Six sigma should be a practical and active process that achieves concrete results. When Motorola began to apply it in the 80s, it sought to correct the defects of the products before they reached the customer, today the Six Sigma projects are focused on improving the productivity and profitability of companies, this aspect being something that makes a lot of managers so attractive.
With Six Sigma Kaizen, it is sought to determine the real capacity of processes to meet customer requirements, and reduce the probability that these fail, reducing it to 3.4 defects per million opportunities. The word sigma is also known as “standard deviation”, a fundamental element in the control and improvement of processes.
To put this methodology into practice, it is necessary to start with the training of the most valuable asset of any organization: its people, since without this it will be difficult to achieve radical improvements in the company's critical processes (critical processes are those with which makes the value proposition a reality to customers or to support the quality promise or policy.
The theoretical support has its foundation in the teachings of Dr. W. Deming on the theory of variation and the theory of causality, when he tells us that “variation is implicit in absolutely all processes, so the fundamental work of management is its control and minimization "and adds that" just as every effect has its cause, every defect also, so we must be able to identify that cause and eliminate it or at least minimize it.
Six Sigma Kaizen projects can be integrated with other concepts such as “High Performance Teams”, since both methodologies are fully complemented, only they are promoted by different schools, on the one hand industrial and statistical engineers and on the other hand sociologists and human development managers, two different approaches to a common problem, enhancing the competitiveness of the company.
When an organization implements quality management systems such as ISO 9000: 2000, it finds in its clauses an invitation to continuous improvement through data analysis, but like everything in the standard it says what, but not how. It also highlights the importance of "root cause analysis" in non-conformities. In none of the ISO Standards, Six Sigma is highlighted as a valid tool for continuous improvement, nor are there international guidelines for its application. The closest is what is established in the ISO 10017 standard, On Statistical Techniques, when it refers to the examination of the inherent variability of a process, in order to estimate its ability to produce results that are in accordance with the range of variation allowed by the specs. This is what is known as process capability.
Since Six Sigma Kaizen is a valuable tool for continuous improvement, it can be wasted if it is applied in isolation from other methodologies, or it becomes the flavor of the month, with some interesting vocabulary and titles that lead us to “fall in love with the model and forget about it. problem".
A critical aspect is the selection of projects to obtain the maximum benefit. Who depends on the decision on which projects to work on, it is not a major problem if you are clear about the company's strategy and what needs to be done to achieve the planned results. It is important to remember that the improvement of the parts does not necessarily improve the whole, this has been raised both from systems theory and from the theory of restrictions and they have been endorsed by the mistakes made in the implementation of Total Quality, the reengineering, ISO systems for quality, etc.
Organizations should not commit to a methodology and forget what has been raised in their Vision, what they have defined as their "Promise to the Client", either through a differentiation proposal or in their "Quality Policy" These divorces lead to companies suffering greater attrition instead of improving their competitiveness, which leads them to corporate suicide.
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