From the course: Six Sigma: Green Belt

Six Sigma and the organization

From the course: Six Sigma: Green Belt

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Six Sigma and the organization

- Every company has goals. They have annual goals to increase revenue, gain market share, improve productivity, quality, reduce costs, and the list goes on. To achieve these goals, companies have plans, initiatives, and projects. Six Sigma is applicable for many of these projects. Six Sigma projects are focused on addressing specific problems, performance deficiencies, or improvement opportunities. When Six Sigma project goals are achieved, performance improves and a company is one step closer to attending its goals, but to be successful, Six Sigma should be viewed as a means not as an end in itself. Unfortunately, this is a very common pitfall among many companies. You should not implement Six Sigma for Six Sigma sake. You should do it to achieve business results. Six Sigma projects should be used as enablers for your organization to improve performance on key operational and business metrics that are critical to the success of your company. This is an important point to establish upfront. To accomplish this, there must be alignment between the projects you select and the goals you want to achieve. Project goals and objectives should be aligned with your organization's key metrics, targets, and goals for the year. The success of every Six Sigma project should be traceable to helping your organization move one step closer to achieving its targets for the year. Let's say you own a company and improve quality is one of your organizational goals. Perhaps the goal is a 20% reduction in the defect rate and cost of repairs. So the key metrics of your Six Sigma project are percent defect rate and the money spent on repairs. What will enable your company to achieve these goals? What is needed to achieve these goals as a combination of multiple Six Sigma projects that focus on reducing defects and reducing the cost of repairs and warranty claims? If your company goal is something else such as to improve on-time delivery, then you can select and launch Six Sigma projects to reduce processing times. As you look ahead to the projects you work on, be sure to use Six Sigma as a way to achieve your company goals and make sure the project goals and company goals are aligned.

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