Six Sigma Criticism/Problems, Chasing down quality.
Posted by travispower on April 21, 2009
Summary: A few of the problems associated with Six Sigma are as follows.
1.) Six Sigma is a rigid program that may or may not fit into a corporations mission and value propositions. What works in business A doesn’t necessarily work in business B.
2.) Six Sigma has been said to be a repackaging of old ideas and doesn’t bring anything new to the quality discipline.
3.) Consultants are employed to run Six Sigma projects more often than training from within the company. The result is a self fulfilling prophecy for these consultants where further projects may be picked that don’t produce much in the way of returns at all. Furthermore, sometimes they can lead to sub-optimization because the consultants do not understand the business as a whole well enough.
4.) Six Sigma is a data driven program requiring many advanced statistical methods that may or may not be understood by consultants. It can be difficult discerning which consultants are good or bad.
5.) Six Sigma does not produce breakthrough improvements required to make leaps in quality and add value for the critical customers of a corporation.
6.) Six Sigma often finds difficulty in getting everybody on board and does not work to change the culture. Once consultants leave, a company will revert back to its original habits.
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Six Sigma is a business management strategy used to increase quality of manufactured goods to high levels, thus reducing the cost of rework by defects. The end result is realized by more profits.
Jack Welch employed six sigma at GE and saw amazing results. When James McNerney took over 3M, he launched a large six sigma campaign that was said to stifle innovation. During the McNerney years, 3M was said to have increased their profits at the expense of new product innovations, which hindered the company from staying ahead of competitors a great deal. The fact of the matter is 3M is an innovation type company, and six sigma was not modified to accompany this business construct.
Joseph Juran gave his two cents to the program stating, “there is nothing new there. It includes what we used to call facilitators. They’ve adopted more flamboyant terms, like belts with different colors. I think that concept has merit to set apart, to create specialists who can be very helpful. Again, that’s not a new idea. The American Society for Quality long ago established certificates, such as for reliability engineers.”
Why has Six Sigma become such a huge program then in the quality world? I think it is because of GE that this program gained so much momentum so fast. When an industry giant takes on a new program, and is very successful, the rest of the industry thinks it can do the same. Eventually, new industries take up the program in hopes that it will work for them too, and the localized successes are showcased for even more of a six sigma frenzy!
These people have failed to realize something very profound in that as Deming put it, “The program works because of the system it is being used in”. What he means by this is, you can’t take a process from business A that has been refined to work great, and apply it to a totally different process or to even the same process in another business. Unfortunately, people think that if it works over there, they can take it and it will work over here just as well. This is not the case.
Another problem I see with Six Sigma is the role of consultants. Consultants preach a self fulfilling prophecy. They can come in, refine one process and then look for another to work on. Six Sigma is an avenue for continuous quality improvement. It is never ending. Therefore, it can be easy for a consultant to seek out work that isn’t impacting the overall quality very much at all. Following the 80/20 rule means that 80% of the defects are coming from 20% of the problems. The idea is to work on those 20% first to realize the largest boost in quality for the resources used.
In my opinion, a green belt, black belt, master black belt, gold belt, whatever belt, should be trained from within an organization. If a consultant is coming in to work on your processes, he will most likely have a tool box full of strategies at his disposal but no idea of what your company is trying to do. This can lead to sub-optimization. Sub-optimization is where a change is made to improve quality in one area of the plant, which ends up negatively effecting another. The result can sometimes mean, a loss of money more than what was gained by making the changes upstream.
The last thing about six sigma that I’d like to mention is that it does not produce breakthrough improvement. The idea behind Six Sigma is to see small incremental changes that over time add up to a large change. Often times quality issues can plateau in that each new project produces a smaller and smaller increase in quality. Making the jump to a new level will require a breakthrough improvement in the business process. Breakthrough improvement is made of the businesses critical customers while incremental improvement adds value for all customers. The point being, a Six Sigma program will eventually lose steam as it sees less and less returns from it.
The last criticism for Six Sigma is not necessarily about the program itself but just the fact that for it to work effectively, it requires full support of the entire company that is employing it. Like everything else that has to do with process improvement, typically workers are scared that eventually they will work themselves out of a job. This can lead to many mixed feelings about projects in the plant. Similarly, if upper management isn’t on board with the program, nothing will ever get changed. As soon as the consultants leave the facility, everything will revert back to how it was before and the program implementation will have failed.
Business Performance Excellence (BPE) is a model that I will explore further in future posts. At the core of this model is a policy deployment system that is used to translate corporate objectives through an organization that mandate a change of culture. These objectives are created into policies, that must be followed and effectively align everyone in an organization with the same goals. Through policy deployment a company can solve the problem of changing their culture which eliminates fallback due to consultants leaving.
