A Successful Six Sigma Project

A Successful Six Sigma Project

In my entire career so far, I have implemented some highly valued projects – infrastructure, applications, policies and procedures etc. Being a student of Six Sigma, it is highly satisfying to be able to translate what you learn into an actual working solution. You will be able to open your eyes and pick out things that need and can be improvised.

Take for example the purchasing approval process. A normal practise which involve manual , paper-based approval from the requestor to the last authorised approver would face typical delays in turnaround time and risk of documents being lost somewhere in transit.  

Six Sigma involves 5 stages called DMAIC where stands D for Define, M=Measure, A=Analyse, I=Improve and C=Control

Step 1 - Define the customers - Basically we need to find out who are the people involved in the process, from the beginning to the end. Who will initiate the purchase request, who will collect the quotes , who will approve, who will monitor and own the process etc? When something goes wrong or unnecessary delays incurred – who will be in charge to look into the issue? Normally the person who is in charge in this case would be the purchasing department and basically the customer.

Define the needs – In this case, we need to find a way to reduce the turnaround time in getting any procurement activities completed

Step 2 – Define the process - Work with the customer and do a walkthrough of the process, use a flowchart and gather the documents involved.

Define how to measure defects - Since we already know the process, we can therefore summarise the cause/s of defects and find out how to measure the key metrics of the current state. In this case the answer is TIME which can be used to define the performance of the procurement process.

Step 3 - Analyze the root cause/s of the problem – which in this case normally is the manual process and hardcopies being used in circulation from one approver to another (sometimes they are located in different locations). Several tools such as fishbone diagrams can be used, where we can further discover more areas of concern such as :

• Absence of approvers in office
• Loss of hardcopies (and therefore more time spent in recovering or restarting the process from the beginning)
• Time taken in delivery of documents within the cycle

Step 4 i.e. Improve – meaning designing and executing the steps needed to resolve the situation which is deployment of a workflow-related application aka the product.

Step 5 – How to sustain the improvement - Control and monitor the results to ensure the objectives are consistently applied . This can be easily accomplished via policy and guidance throughout the organisation about the newly implemented procedures in procurement. We need to identify the respective head of departments such as finance, IT etc in order for them to enforce this new process. Communication need to be planned and executed in order to ensure awareness and proper training (onsite and remote) need to be conducted. As far as monitoring and measuring is concerned, we can deploy, tweak and add the existing monitoring features to keep abreast of procurement cycle performance for review purposes. One of the tools that can be used is Minitab where we can use it for statistical analysis.

In summary - If these factors can be incorporated in pre-deployment or sales pitch to potential customers, greater growth in productivity can be accomplished without much hassle or questions as the measurement of metrics themselves (before and after deployment) can speak for themselves. Statistics play a huge part in measuring success of any new deployment in any organisation…