What is Six Sigma? Importance of Six Sigma in today's world.

What is Six Sigma, the term Bill Smith, while working in Motorola propounded and propagated? How much do we know about it? Is it the new flavour of the season or a new technology that people have just woken up to?

Six Sigma is a process. It didn't spring up overnight. It has been around, and it is going to be around. Six Sigma, simply put, is a more innovative way to manage a business. It is process driven, puts the customer first, and uses stark facts and data to achieve a better solution. `

There came a time when the denominator management system came into being, and organisations thought getting rid of employees was the sure-shot way to profitability. But the denominator management idea backfired, as with less staff, the quality started worsening, which resulted in reduced customer satisfaction, which further reduced the existing business, ending up in market share loss and competitors winning it all.

This is the time that Six Sigma started gaining popularity, and organisations and employees started understanding the efficacy of this approach.

What is the methodology that Six Sigma uses?

There are three unique ways in which Six Sigma differs from the other Total Quality Management (TQM) processes, specifically:

1. Six Sigma is intrinsically focused on customers.

2. Six Sigma-driven projects produce massive returns on investments.

3. Six Sigma inherently changes how management operates.

The Six Theories of Six Sigma

A quick look at the six principles -

1. Customer-Centricity - As mentioned earlier, Six Sigma's primary focus is customer-centricity. Six Sigma breakthroughs are measured by their impact on customer satisfaction and value.

2. Data and Fact Driven - The Six Sigma practice begins by elucidating what information or data are cardinal in measuring business performance and then collates the data to analyse key variables.

3. The process is King - Six Sigma accords “process” as the central vehicle toward attaining success. Whether an organisation is designing products or providing services, mastering the various workflows and processes is THE key to creating a competitive edge.

4. Proactive Management - Proactive means being aware of what might happen rather than reacting to a situation. Six Sigma puts much weight on proactive management that can adopt methodologies that can be a game-changer.

5. Boundaryless Collaboration - GE's Chairman Jack Welch coined the term Boundaryless. He was one of the proponents of Six Sigma. Boundaryless means breaking down organisational barriers and increasing teamwork. The opportunities for seamless collaboration within the organisation, between organisations, with vendors and customers, are stupendous. If organisations, internally and externally, work for a common goal - customer satisfaction and profitability- there will be a complete paradigm shift.

6. Being tolerant of failure to achieve perfection - Sounds contradictory but the two ideas are complementary. If people or the management team are afraid of taking risks, they will never try and, in the process, will never reach a near-perfect state.

Additional benefits of adopting a Six Sigma approach

Six Sigma, as mentioned earlier, helps improve accuracy in the process by focusing on defect-per-million-opportunity or DPMO and can play a vital role in creating strategic decisions to improve the organisation's revenue. It reduces the variation in operations, focuses on efficiency, and avoids waste.

With the pandemic largely behind us, the global workforce and working patterns have evolved and undergone tremendous change. Six Sigma is the perfect tool to help with change management and cope with the new normal. With emerging technologies, customer expectations are changing rapidly, and with customer centricity at its core, Six Sigma is THE tool for every organisation and individual to move forward and create a  global niche.

Six Sigma helps you to acquire acuity in driving critical decisions through problem-solving based on objective data as a substitute for subjective opinion. It enables you to understand applying a structured methodology to solve problems of any proportion.

Thus, it is not surprising that organisations and employees will look for a solution that is tried and tested with positive results in an evolving world. Former GE CEO Jack Welch, back in 1997 wrote in their annual report that "We didn't invent Six Sigma - we learned it. The cumulative impact on the company's numbers is neither anecdotal nor a product of charts. It is the product of 276,600 people executing and delivering the result of Six Sigma to our bottom line."

Twenty-five years since then, it is once again of extreme importance that we propagate the brilliant theory, which is Six Sigma, in a world that is ever-changing and highly competitive, where speed and acumen may not get you to the top of the ladder and may not take an organisation to the zenith.

It is time to take up the reigns of Six Sigma in our hands because it is Six Sigma that will help organisations nurture empowered employees to distinguish and propel improvement ideas.