【翻译】第四十七篇 Is Six Sigma Dead
本帖最后由 小编H 于 2011-11-21 13:23 编辑
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提供者：Liphking
IsSix Sigma Dead?Ifit is, how can we revive it?by J. Bruce WeeksIn 50 Words Or Less
Six Sigma will fail without leadershipcommitment, an implementation strategy, correct accounting methods, culturalintegration and decisions based on global optima.
Instead of being one of the goals andobjectives, implementation must be integrated.
In addition, lean should precede Six Sigma.
There are reports from the field about thedeath of Six Sigma.1 The word is that it has been overused, has notbrought its expected benefits and that newer methods, such as the theory ofconstraints and systems thinking, are replacing it.
A 2007 study from the consulting firmQualPro showed that 53 of 58 large companies that use Six Sigma have trailedthe S&P 500 since they implemented it.2
The quality profession needs to examine theunderlying root causes so we can repair the damage being done to Six Sigma’sreputation.
Diagnosing the problemSix Sigma can fail for a variety ofreasons:
Lack of leadership strategy and commitment.Not enoughleaders truly understand that Six Sigma is not an overnight savior. It takestime and work to achieve outstanding results.3, 4
Too many leaders bought into what wascalled the "latest and greatest fad" in business process fixes,rolled out a Six Sigma program, trained everyone and now have up to 80% oftheir people working on projects to improve processes.5 This sort of SixSigma undertaking can often take valuable resources away from launching newproducts and satisfying customers—core processes required to stay in businessand make money year after year. In fact, companies must provide customersatisfaction as job No. 1.
Many Six Sigma implementations were notintegrated into the goals and objectives of companies, and Six Sigma simplybecame one of the goals and objectives.6The Six Sigma rollout wasn’t customerfocused7 or tied to the overall strategic plan for business-aligned costreductions.
Six Sigma tends to be applied to everythingwith this kind of an implementation plan. This dilutes the effort, and it isexactly what happened at Sun Microsystems.8The results take too long and are ofpoor quality, yielding low return on investment (ROI).9
Six Sigma Black Belts (BB) end up focusingon small projects that have little risk and can be implemented very quickly, soany results achieved are minor at best.10A stigma grows around a program thattakes so much resource application for so little gain. Sun eventually abandonedSix Sigma in most of its departments.11
Another problem occurs whenleaders declare victory after using Six Sigma to solve one problem or one setof problems. The organization then decides to move on to the next "latestand greatest thing," usually lean.12, 13
The company leaders then launch a newinitiative and their attentions are distracted from SixSigma.14 Enthusiasm wanes, no measures have been installed to keep the SixSigma team on track, and empowerment of the BBs never happens. It is all overtoo quickly.
Incorrect accounting methods. Mostcompanies also suffer from using the wrong measures to determine Six Sigmaresults. Activity-based costing (ABC) and resource-consumption accounting (RCA)practices do not lend themselves to determining the value of a particularactivity or resource to the revenue stream or customer satisfaction.15
These organizations track only what it costto do an activity or use a resource in aggregate, not by individual activity orwhether the activity contributed to customer satisfaction.16 Poormanagement decisions result during cost cutting; layoffs cause loss of valuablecompany knowledge and wholesale elimination of plants because their performanceis considered poor.
Because both accounting methods focus oncost, they miss the value created by Six Sigma projects. They also report thevalue far too late to be of real use. That leaves them improving thenonvalue-added processes.17
Poor cultural integration. Thisresults in projects that become randomly selected on a "that soundsgood" basis. The leaders do not establish strategic goals and objectivesthat embrace Six Sigma, but instead merely add Six Sigma as agoal.18,19 Six Sigma projects are launched on their own perceived meritsbut have no company strategy to tie into except the Six Sigma goal itself.
Local instead of global thinking. Thereis also a tendency to optimize local processes without thinking about theglobal impacts. Because projects tend to be handed out, they also tend to comewith suggested root causes based on the leaders’ perceptions.
This takesempowerment away from Black Belts to really dig in and determine a root cause. Because the leader’s perceptionof the answer already exists, there is a tendency for team members to beassigned to the BB before the real root cause has been determined. Without atrue root cause, it cannot be known which subject matter experts will beneeded.20 The team then struggles because it doesn’t have the right peopleto solve the problem after it’s been taken to an actionable level.21 Human issues. Companies often don’tplan Six Sigma initiatives well. It’s rolled out with lots of fanfare in fancypresentations to employees. Then the real work of training the Green Belts (GB)and BBs starts.
The rest of the organization does not hearanything more about it for a few weeks—or months. The initial shine has beentarnished. Employees are asking, "Where are these big improvements I heardabout?" and saying, "No one has asked me about what I think should bedone!"
The company’s culture has not been changed.GBs and BBs are not supported fully in their roles as change agents. Often,they have other jobs that demand their time and take away from their ability tocontinually scout for bottom-line opportunities. Lacking leadership commitment,Six Sigma will eventually stall.22
All of this leaves a bad taste ineveryone’s mouth. Leaders don’t get the returns they expected, BBs aren’tempowered or are unable to realize their full potential, and the other SixSigma team members wonder why they are spending time doing things that resultin no real gain.
Even worse, the control systems that mayhave been installed are ignored, and everything goes back to business as usual.
The cureThere is a better way, often using methodsthat have worked at other organizations.
Leadership commitment and strategy. Tomake Six Sigma a useful tool again, first an organization needs to createstrategic business goals and objectives that embrace Six Sigma thinking insteadof trying to add it as a separate goal or objective. All goals and objectivesmust be customer focused and provide value.
Key critical-to-qualitydrivers—such as cost, new product introductions and market share—must bedetermined based on those goals and objectives. The real key to making thiswork is to realize that what is measured will be worked on.23 Be careful what measurements you choose tomonitor the improvements and what you tie bonuses to. If you aren’t careful,you will get exactly what you asked for at the sacrifice of almost everythingelse.
A better approach would be totake a lesson from 3M, which trained most of its staff and launched Six Sigmaprojects everywhere.24 When George Buckley came on board as the new CEOnearly five years later, he quickly realized that an overemphasis on Six Sigmahad completely stifled creativity within an organization built on innovation.
"While process excellencedemands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation,failure, and serendipity," said Brian Hindo, corporate strategies editorat BusinessWeek in an article about the 3M experience.25
Hindo explained that Buckley set up aformat in which workers could seek funding from several sources, and thecompany allowed employees to use 15% of their time to pursue independentprojects. This approach encourages risk taking.
Compare this with 3M’s initiallaunch of Six Sigma, when employees were required to have a minimum number ofSix Sigma projects per year and routinely complete charts on commercialpotential, market size and manufacturing concerns. Data-driven decisionscreated an environment in which "incremental work took precedence overblue-sky research."26
In another example of total commitment tokeep Six Sigma efforts at the forefront, General Electric (GE) ensured it gottop-down commitment by linking 40% of each top management bonus to successfulimplementation of Six Sigma goals.
This was in addition to requiring allexempt employees to train intensively in Six Sigma methods and complete aproject. Further, becoming a GB was a minimum requirement for promotion of anyemployee.27 Driving Six Sigma from the top down by linking remuneration toits success ensures it will be used effectively.
Accounting methods. A better financialreporting system needs to be added to capture the improvements early. Financialmeasures using ABC and RCA accounting will most likely be useful only foroverall company health (macro level) and should not be used to track processimprovement (micro level).
Most financial measures are too slow andtoo aggregated to determine those micro-level improvements. ABC and RCAaccounting systems both track costs that are effects, not causes.28
It may be better to take a lessonfrom lean in this instance. For example, the Wiremold Co. measures at theproduction cell level.29
Wiremold posts charts and graphs with trendanalyses at the cells and uses measurements shown in Table 1. None of thesemeasurements are financial. All are customer focused, operations driven andreflect global rather than local optima.30 Table 1 shows a perfectcombination of value-to-the-customer determination and, ultimately, value tothe organization.
1Cultural integration. At GE, all Six Sigma projects are tied to a strategic business goal as a prerequisite.31 This ensures the organization is working on the right projects. And with the executive bonuses tied in, employees will get the time they need to actually work on projects.
When an organization has goals and objectives with appropriate measures that can quickly and accurately reveal the results of improvement efforts, it must determine a project-selection process. All improvement projects must then meet several criteria:
Have a project charter that clearly defines the scope.
Have an assigned leader and tentative team.32
Have an expected timeline for completion.
Have an expected ROI that meets company goals.
Have prioritization determination factors that include risk tolerance, productivity enhancements, added profits and revenue, and cost avoidance.33
With these criteria and a clear understanding of resource availability, the executive team can make informed decisions about which projects move forward now and which will be placed in the parking lot for potential implementation later.34 Organizations should work on the 4% of problems that cause 50% of the issues.35 Give the BBs projects that state the objective, not a ready-made answer.
The addition of lean to the Six Sigma processes to create lean Six Sigma (LSS) makes so much sense that not doing it seems unimaginable. This combination of two methods to reduce waste first, eliminate defects and improve the remaining necessary processes is powerful.
It is also important to continuously set new goals and objectives as LSS begins to deliver results. Today’s 110% is tomorrow’s 95%. This will avoid complacency that tends to set in after a goal has been achieved, particularly if it was a difficult project.36 Don’t forget to provide recognition for those who secured that hard-fought victory.
Local vs. global optima. A better example of linking local to global optima is found again at Wiremold.
Wiremold’s measurements at the production cell level are shown in Table 2. Referring to Table 1, the production cell-level measures derive directly from the company-level measurements. The measurements are how the strategic goals and objectives are decided on and are nearly immediate, while a cost-accounting measurement would be at least one month late.
Again, these factory-floor measurementshave no direct financial data connection because costs are effects, not causes.Wiremold looks at causes daily, and each worker can see the effect of his orher work and react immediately if things seem to be going astray. Measurementsof this type can be easily automated.37
Human issues. All employees need toknow about an LSS initiative, but not all need full GB or BB training. It’s OKif most are White Belts or Yellow Belts. You don’t need 80% of your peopleworking on 20% of the organization’s problems. Stay focused on what the companydoes that makes money.
Reward and recognize improvement teams. Companyfunctions, newsletters and other house organs should proudly announce thebenefits achieved and directly recognize team members and leaders. Team outingsor a line item in the company yearly reports are also good recognition methodsthat will build team morale and engage the organization more completely.
But recognition needs to be even more thanthat. When an employee makes it to BB and does a good job, the company needs tofind a way to provide advancement opportunities. Being a Black Belt cannot bethe end of the line.
If a company is truly dedicated to LSS, aseparate department might be created to actively seek out improvement projectswithout the encumbrances of other tasks more directly related to the product orservice.
This can provide enterprisewide leadershipof LSS and will give the company a total focus on LSS and the ability to trulyseek LSS opportunities, develop well-thought-out projects for the executiveteam to prioritize, assemble its teams and implement the improvement.38 Further,there would be a place for rewarding the successful LSS BB or Master BB withsupervisory positions.
Revive Six SigmaSix Sigma alone is not enough anymorebecause you "would not want to drive process performance to a Six Sigmalevel—3.4 defects per one million opportunities—for a fat and sloppy processwith all sorts of unnecessary redo loops."39 Only if we eliminate thewaste first can we truly improve the processes under study.
But here we need to be careful yet again.Toyota has been in the news a lot lately for what some call an overly strictadherence to lean thinking. Lean is being blamed for the issues and recallsToyota has experienced.
You can’t build a house with only acarpenter’s toolbox; among others, you need concrete tools and electrician’stools. Similarly, to build a better process, an organization must use toolsfrom all the quality toolboxes, including lean, Six Sigma and total qualitymanagement. And the tool used must be appropriate to the situation.
With changes to an organization’s way ofthinking, an LSS effort can now be a part of a normative business system forthe long haul.40 Select key drivers that are customer focused and haveclear key success factors. An organization will be managing to value, not cost.That way, financial reporting will be consistent and timely, and global goalsand objectives will be supported.41
By following these guidelines, we canrevive a valuable tool set that will be used at the right time and in the rightplace to be of great benefit to organizations and their customers.
你好，我是小编H。请对以下文章有翻译兴趣的组员留下你的预计完成时间，并发短信息联系小编H，以便小编登记翻译者信息以及文章最终完成时的奖惩工作。感谢支持翻译组！
提供者：Liphking
IsSix Sigma Dead?Ifit is, how can we revive it?by J. Bruce WeeksIn 50 Words Or Less
Six Sigma will fail without leadershipcommitment, an implementation strategy, correct accounting methods, culturalintegration and decisions based on global optima.
Instead of being one of the goals andobjectives, implementation must be integrated.
In addition, lean should precede Six Sigma.
There are reports from the field about thedeath of Six Sigma.1 The word is that it has been overused, has notbrought its expected benefits and that newer methods, such as the theory ofconstraints and systems thinking, are replacing it.
A 2007 study from the consulting firmQualPro showed that 53 of 58 large companies that use Six Sigma have trailedthe S&P 500 since they implemented it.2
The quality profession needs to examine theunderlying root causes so we can repair the damage being done to Six Sigma’sreputation.
Diagnosing the problemSix Sigma can fail for a variety ofreasons:
Lack of leadership strategy and commitment.Not enoughleaders truly understand that Six Sigma is not an overnight savior. It takestime and work to achieve outstanding results.3, 4
Too many leaders bought into what wascalled the "latest and greatest fad" in business process fixes,rolled out a Six Sigma program, trained everyone and now have up to 80% oftheir people working on projects to improve processes.5 This sort of SixSigma undertaking can often take valuable resources away from launching newproducts and satisfying customers—core processes required to stay in businessand make money year after year. In fact, companies must provide customersatisfaction as job No. 1.
Many Six Sigma implementations were notintegrated into the goals and objectives of companies, and Six Sigma simplybecame one of the goals and objectives.6The Six Sigma rollout wasn’t customerfocused7 or tied to the overall strategic plan for business-aligned costreductions.
Six Sigma tends to be applied to everythingwith this kind of an implementation plan. This dilutes the effort, and it isexactly what happened at Sun Microsystems.8The results take too long and are ofpoor quality, yielding low return on investment (ROI).9
Six Sigma Black Belts (BB) end up focusingon small projects that have little risk and can be implemented very quickly, soany results achieved are minor at best.10A stigma grows around a program thattakes so much resource application for so little gain. Sun eventually abandonedSix Sigma in most of its departments.11
Another problem occurs whenleaders declare victory after using Six Sigma to solve one problem or one setof problems. The organization then decides to move on to the next "latestand greatest thing," usually lean.12, 13
The company leaders then launch a newinitiative and their attentions are distracted from SixSigma.14 Enthusiasm wanes, no measures have been installed to keep the SixSigma team on track, and empowerment of the BBs never happens. It is all overtoo quickly.
Incorrect accounting methods. Mostcompanies also suffer from using the wrong measures to determine Six Sigmaresults. Activity-based costing (ABC) and resource-consumption accounting (RCA)practices do not lend themselves to determining the value of a particularactivity or resource to the revenue stream or customer satisfaction.15
These organizations track only what it costto do an activity or use a resource in aggregate, not by individual activity orwhether the activity contributed to customer satisfaction.16 Poormanagement decisions result during cost cutting; layoffs cause loss of valuablecompany knowledge and wholesale elimination of plants because their performanceis considered poor.
Because both accounting methods focus oncost, they miss the value created by Six Sigma projects. They also report thevalue far too late to be of real use. That leaves them improving thenonvalue-added processes.17
Poor cultural integration. Thisresults in projects that become randomly selected on a "that soundsgood" basis. The leaders do not establish strategic goals and objectivesthat embrace Six Sigma, but instead merely add Six Sigma as agoal.18,19 Six Sigma projects are launched on their own perceived meritsbut have no company strategy to tie into except the Six Sigma goal itself.
Local instead of global thinking. Thereis also a tendency to optimize local processes without thinking about theglobal impacts. Because projects tend to be handed out, they also tend to comewith suggested root causes based on the leaders’ perceptions.
This takesempowerment away from Black Belts to really dig in and determine a root cause. Because the leader’s perceptionof the answer already exists, there is a tendency for team members to beassigned to the BB before the real root cause has been determined. Without atrue root cause, it cannot be known which subject matter experts will beneeded.20 The team then struggles because it doesn’t have the right peopleto solve the problem after it’s been taken to an actionable level.21 Human issues. Companies often don’tplan Six Sigma initiatives well. It’s rolled out with lots of fanfare in fancypresentations to employees. Then the real work of training the Green Belts (GB)and BBs starts.
The rest of the organization does not hearanything more about it for a few weeks—or months. The initial shine has beentarnished. Employees are asking, "Where are these big improvements I heardabout?" and saying, "No one has asked me about what I think should bedone!"
The company’s culture has not been changed.GBs and BBs are not supported fully in their roles as change agents. Often,they have other jobs that demand their time and take away from their ability tocontinually scout for bottom-line opportunities. Lacking leadership commitment,Six Sigma will eventually stall.22
All of this leaves a bad taste ineveryone’s mouth. Leaders don’t get the returns they expected, BBs aren’tempowered or are unable to realize their full potential, and the other SixSigma team members wonder why they are spending time doing things that resultin no real gain.
Even worse, the control systems that mayhave been installed are ignored, and everything goes back to business as usual.
The cureThere is a better way, often using methodsthat have worked at other organizations.
Leadership commitment and strategy. Tomake Six Sigma a useful tool again, first an organization needs to createstrategic business goals and objectives that embrace Six Sigma thinking insteadof trying to add it as a separate goal or objective. All goals and objectivesmust be customer focused and provide value.
Key critical-to-qualitydrivers—such as cost, new product introductions and market share—must bedetermined based on those goals and objectives. The real key to making thiswork is to realize that what is measured will be worked on.23 Be careful what measurements you choose tomonitor the improvements and what you tie bonuses to. If you aren’t careful,you will get exactly what you asked for at the sacrifice of almost everythingelse.
A better approach would be totake a lesson from 3M, which trained most of its staff and launched Six Sigmaprojects everywhere.24 When George Buckley came on board as the new CEOnearly five years later, he quickly realized that an overemphasis on Six Sigmahad completely stifled creativity within an organization built on innovation.
"While process excellencedemands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation,failure, and serendipity," said Brian Hindo, corporate strategies editorat BusinessWeek in an article about the 3M experience.25
Hindo explained that Buckley set up aformat in which workers could seek funding from several sources, and thecompany allowed employees to use 15% of their time to pursue independentprojects. This approach encourages risk taking.
Compare this with 3M’s initiallaunch of Six Sigma, when employees were required to have a minimum number ofSix Sigma projects per year and routinely complete charts on commercialpotential, market size and manufacturing concerns. Data-driven decisionscreated an environment in which "incremental work took precedence overblue-sky research."26
In another example of total commitment tokeep Six Sigma efforts at the forefront, General Electric (GE) ensured it gottop-down commitment by linking 40% of each top management bonus to successfulimplementation of Six Sigma goals.
This was in addition to requiring allexempt employees to train intensively in Six Sigma methods and complete aproject. Further, becoming a GB was a minimum requirement for promotion of anyemployee.27 Driving Six Sigma from the top down by linking remuneration toits success ensures it will be used effectively.
Accounting methods. A better financialreporting system needs to be added to capture the improvements early. Financialmeasures using ABC and RCA accounting will most likely be useful only foroverall company health (macro level) and should not be used to track processimprovement (micro level).
Most financial measures are too slow andtoo aggregated to determine those micro-level improvements. ABC and RCAaccounting systems both track costs that are effects, not causes.28
It may be better to take a lessonfrom lean in this instance. For example, the Wiremold Co. measures at theproduction cell level.29
Wiremold posts charts and graphs with trendanalyses at the cells and uses measurements shown in Table 1. None of thesemeasurements are financial. All are customer focused, operations driven andreflect global rather than local optima.30 Table 1 shows a perfectcombination of value-to-the-customer determination and, ultimately, value tothe organization.
1Cultural integration. At GE, all Six Sigma projects are tied to a strategic business goal as a prerequisite.31 This ensures the organization is working on the right projects. And with the executive bonuses tied in, employees will get the time they need to actually work on projects.
When an organization has goals and objectives with appropriate measures that can quickly and accurately reveal the results of improvement efforts, it must determine a project-selection process. All improvement projects must then meet several criteria:
Have a project charter that clearly defines the scope.
Have an assigned leader and tentative team.32
Have an expected timeline for completion.
Have an expected ROI that meets company goals.
Have prioritization determination factors that include risk tolerance, productivity enhancements, added profits and revenue, and cost avoidance.33
With these criteria and a clear understanding of resource availability, the executive team can make informed decisions about which projects move forward now and which will be placed in the parking lot for potential implementation later.34 Organizations should work on the 4% of problems that cause 50% of the issues.35 Give the BBs projects that state the objective, not a ready-made answer.
The addition of lean to the Six Sigma processes to create lean Six Sigma (LSS) makes so much sense that not doing it seems unimaginable. This combination of two methods to reduce waste first, eliminate defects and improve the remaining necessary processes is powerful.
It is also important to continuously set new goals and objectives as LSS begins to deliver results. Today’s 110% is tomorrow’s 95%. This will avoid complacency that tends to set in after a goal has been achieved, particularly if it was a difficult project.36 Don’t forget to provide recognition for those who secured that hard-fought victory.
Local vs. global optima. A better example of linking local to global optima is found again at Wiremold.
Wiremold’s measurements at the production cell level are shown in Table 2. Referring to Table 1, the production cell-level measures derive directly from the company-level measurements. The measurements are how the strategic goals and objectives are decided on and are nearly immediate, while a cost-accounting measurement would be at least one month late.
Again, these factory-floor measurementshave no direct financial data connection because costs are effects, not causes.Wiremold looks at causes daily, and each worker can see the effect of his orher work and react immediately if things seem to be going astray. Measurementsof this type can be easily automated.37
Human issues. All employees need toknow about an LSS initiative, but not all need full GB or BB training. It’s OKif most are White Belts or Yellow Belts. You don’t need 80% of your peopleworking on 20% of the organization’s problems. Stay focused on what the companydoes that makes money.
Reward and recognize improvement teams. Companyfunctions, newsletters and other house organs should proudly announce thebenefits achieved and directly recognize team members and leaders. Team outingsor a line item in the company yearly reports are also good recognition methodsthat will build team morale and engage the organization more completely.
But recognition needs to be even more thanthat. When an employee makes it to BB and does a good job, the company needs tofind a way to provide advancement opportunities. Being a Black Belt cannot bethe end of the line.
If a company is truly dedicated to LSS, aseparate department might be created to actively seek out improvement projectswithout the encumbrances of other tasks more directly related to the product orservice.
This can provide enterprisewide leadershipof LSS and will give the company a total focus on LSS and the ability to trulyseek LSS opportunities, develop well-thought-out projects for the executiveteam to prioritize, assemble its teams and implement the improvement.38 Further,there would be a place for rewarding the successful LSS BB or Master BB withsupervisory positions.
Revive Six SigmaSix Sigma alone is not enough anymorebecause you "would not want to drive process performance to a Six Sigmalevel—3.4 defects per one million opportunities—for a fat and sloppy processwith all sorts of unnecessary redo loops."39 Only if we eliminate thewaste first can we truly improve the processes under study.
But here we need to be careful yet again.Toyota has been in the news a lot lately for what some call an overly strictadherence to lean thinking. Lean is being blamed for the issues and recallsToyota has experienced.
You can’t build a house with only acarpenter’s toolbox; among others, you need concrete tools and electrician’stools. Similarly, to build a better process, an organization must use toolsfrom all the quality toolboxes, including lean, Six Sigma and total qualitymanagement. And the tool used must be appropriate to the situation.
With changes to an organization’s way ofthinking, an LSS effort can now be a part of a normative business system forthe long haul.40 Select key drivers that are customer focused and haveclear key success factors. An organization will be managing to value, not cost.That way, financial reporting will be consistent and timely, and global goalsand objectives will be supported.41
By following these guidelines, we canrevive a valuable tool set that will be used at the right time and in the rightplace to be of great benefit to organizations and their customers.
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