17-04-2012, 11:10 AM
Six Sigma
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Making Customers Feel Six Sigma Quality
Globalization and instant access to information, products and services have changed the way
our customers conduct business — old business models no longer work. Today’s competitive
environment leaves no room for error. We must delight our customers and relentlessly look for
new ways to exceed their expectations. This is why Six Sigma Quality has becom e a part
of our culture.
What is Six Sigma?
systematically figure out how
to eliminate them and get as close to “zero defects” as possible. Six Sigma has changed
the DNA of GE — it is now the way we work — in everything we do and in every product
we design.
GE’s Evolution Towards Quality
GE began moving towards a focus on quality in the late ‘80s. Work-Out®, the start of our
journey, opened our culture to ideas from everyone, everywhere, decimated the bureaucracy
and made boundaryless behavior a reflexive, natural part of our culture, thereby creating
the learning environment that led to Six Sigma. Now, Six Sigma, in turn, is embedding
quality thinking — process thinking — across every level and in every operation of our
Company around the globe.
Work-Out® in the 1980s defined how we behave. Today, Six Sigma is defining how we
work and has set the stage for making our customers feel Six Sigma.
1990 TIME
INTENSITY
High
Low
Six Sigma Quality:
The Road to Customer Impact
Key Strategy Initiatives:
QMI, NPI, OTR, SM, Productivity, Globalization
Change Acceleration Process:
Increase Success and Acceleration Change
Process Improvement:
Continuous Improvement, Reengineering
Productivity/Best Practices:
Looking Outside GE
Work-Out/Town Meetings:
Empowerment, Bureaucracy Busting
GE’s Evolution Towards Quality
Key Elements of Quality...Customer, Process and Employee
There are three key elements of quality: customer, process and employee. Everything we do to remain a world-class
quality company focuses on these three essential elements.
...the Customer
Delighting Customers
Customers are the center of GE’s universe: they define quality. They expect
performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct
transaction processing and more. In every attribute that influences customer perception,
we know that just being good is not enough. Delighting our customers is a necessity.
Because if we don’t do it, someone else will!
...the Process
Outside-In Thinking
Quality requires us to look at our business from the customer’s perspective, not ours. In other
words, we must look at our processes from the outside-in. By understanding the transaction
lifecycle from the customer’s needs
and processes, we can discover
what they are seeing and feeling.
With this knowledge, we can
identify areas where we can add
significant value or improvement
from their perspective.
...the Employee
Leadership Commitment
People create results. Involving all employees is essential to GE’s quality approach. GE is
committed to providing opportunities and incentives for employees to focus their talents and
energies on satisfying customers.
All GE employees are trained in the strategy, statistical tools and techniques of Six Sigma
quality. Training courses are offered at various levels:
Quality Overview Seminars: basic Six Sigma awareness.
Team Training: basic tool introduction to equip employees to participate on
Six Sigma teams.
Master Black Belt, Black Belt and Green Belt Training: in-depth quality training
that includes high-level statistical tools, basic quality control tools, Change Acceleration
Process and Flow technology tools.
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Training: prepares teams for the use of
statistical tools to design it right the first time.
Quality is the responsibility of every employee. Every employee must be involved, motivated
and knowledgeable if we are to succeed.
Customer
Process
GE Process
A B C
Customer’s
View of GE’s
Contribution
GE’s View
of Its
Contribution
The Six Sigma Strategy
To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. An “opportunity”
is defined as a chance for nonconformance, or not meeting the required specifications. This means we need to be nearly
flawless in executing our key processes. Six Sigma is a vision we strive toward and a philosophy that is part of our
business culture.
Key Concepts of Six Sigma
At its core, Six Sigma revolves around a few key concepts.
Critical to Quality: Attributes most important to the customer
Defect: Failing to deliver what the customer wants
Process Capability: What your process can deliver
Variation: What the customer sees and feels
Stable Operations: Ensuring consistent, predictable processes to improve
what the customer sees and feels
Design for Six Sigma: Designing to meet customer needs and process capability
Our Customers Feel the Variance, Not the Mean
Often, our inside-out view of the business is based on average or mean-based measures of our recent past. Customers
don’t judge us on averages, they feel the variance in each transaction, each product we ship. Six Sigma focuses first on
reducing process variation and then on improving the process capability.
Customers value consistent, predictable business processes that deliver world-class levels of quality. This is what Six
Sigma strives to produce.
GE’s Commitment to Quality
GE’s success with Six Sigma has exceeded our most optimistic predictions. Across the Company, GE associates
embrace Six Sigma’s customer-focused, data-driven philosophy and apply it to everything we do. We are building
on these successes by sharing best practices across all of our businesses, putting the full power of GE behind our
quest for better, faster customer solutions.