How six-sigma changes corporate culture

Six Sigma is as much about people excellence as it is about technical excellence. Employees often wonder how they are going to solve a difficult problem, but when they are given the tools to ask the right questions, measure the right things, correlate a problem with a solution and plan a course of action, they can find solutions to the problem more easily.

Therefore, with Six Sigma, the company’s corporate culture shifts to one that includes a systematic approach to problem solving and a pro-active attitude among employees. Successful Six Sigma programs also contribute to the overall sense of pride of the company’s employees. Six Sigma transforms the way a company thinks and works on major business issues:

• Process design: Designing production processes to have the best and most consistent outcomes from the beginning.
• Variable investigation: conducting studies to identify what the variables cause variation and how they interact with each other.
• Analysis and reasoning: using facts and data to find the root causes of variations, instead of educated guesses or intuition.
• Focus on process improvement: focusing on process improvement as key to excellence in quality.
• Pro-activeness: Encouraging people to be pro-active about preventing potential problems instead of waiting for problems to occur.
• Broad participation in problem solving: getting more people involved in finding causes and solutions for problems.
• Knowledge sharing: learning and sharing new knowledge in terms of best practices to speed up overall improvement.
• Goal setting: aiming at stretch goals, instead of “good enough” targets, so that the company is constantly striving for improvement.
• Suppliers: cost is not the only criteria for vendor evaluation, but relative capability to consistently provide quality materials with the shortest lead time.
• Data-based decision making: Decisions are made based on critical analysis of facts and data. However, this does NOT mean it will negatively impact to a company’s ability to make quick decisions. In contrast, by smoothly applying the DMAIC principles, the decision makers are more likely to have the data they need in order to make well informed decisions.