And Six Sigma, and its sister, Lean Six Sigma, are flourishing. “Because Six Sigma is based on scientific principles, decisions were based on facts and data instead of feelings and intuition,” writes the authors of a case study of a program introduced in a 384-bed general hospital in the Netherlands in 2003 that was credited with saving hundreds of thousands of dollars (van den Heuvel, Does, & Bisgaard, 2005).Īs I write this in 2016, TQM and BPR as formal change management programs have fallen out of favor. And by doing so, it has the potential to promote the elimination of jobs and parts of jobs that are not adding to the organization’s value. Like BPR, it is a “top down” management tool (Dong-Suk, 2010), and it systematically seeks to redesign any business process that is either unnecessary, or contributes to defects. Like TQM, it involves the participation of every member of the organization, and infuses employees with a spirit of improving the quality of the organization’s product or service delivery at every possible way it can. It has much in common with the earlier versions of quality improvement management strategies, such as TQM and BPR. Six Sigma conjures up a new way of thinking about business processes-“how to work smart” rather than “how to work hard” (Dong-Suk, 2010). Investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in the strategy were reported to have resulted in billions of dollars in savings (Suresh, Antony, Kumar, & Douglas, 2012). Much of its popularity, beginning in the late 1990s, resulted from reports of spectacular results, including those of General Electric’s legendary CEO, Jack Welch, an early adopter. ![]() ’Six Sigma’ has come to mean different things to different people because the core concept has diversified to become a philosophy, a belief system, and a disciplined process for rapid improvement (Lazerus & Butler, 2001). In practical terms, this means that the goal is to reduce defects to 3.4 per million events. 0034%, equivalent to six standard deviations from the mean. Its goal is to reduce the number of events in which a product falls outside of intended acceptable limits to. It gets its name from the Greek letter (σ) used in the statistical term representing standard deviation. Its intent is to reduce waste and rework, and streamline these business processes, eliminating unnecessary steps that may add to defects, and improve processes to further the intended goal of producing “virtually perfect” outcomes-thus increasing profits and increasing customer satisfaction. ![]() ![]() “6 Sigma”), a registered trademark of the Motorola Corporation, refers to a statistically-based technique to reduce variability in business processes. Six Sigma chapter: Improving Quality and Performance in Your Nonprofit Organization copyright 2016 by Gary M.
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