"The benefits using Six Sigma in business"

Six Sigma, has become one of the most used methodologies across industries, but why is so attractive for businesses? Because Six Sigma is a methodology designed to eliminate problems, remove waste and inefficiency, and control the performance by reducing the variability in the processes of the company. That is the basic premise underlying the Six Sigma technique, one of the most popular and popularized within the productive fabric for its huge impact on the income statement and satisfaction improving working conditions to provide a better response to customers' needs.

Six Sigma philosophy was implanted for the first time at Motorola in 1987, thanks to the efforts of engineer Bill Smith (1929-1993) as a business strategy and quality improvement. Later it would be improved by General Electric and would end up as an evolution of the theories of quality TQM (Total Quality Management), SPC (Statistical Process Control) and the PDCA Cycle of Deming.

Motorola was having issues with the processes, so they created a way to improve their efficiency and effectiveness by focusing on productivity, cost reduction and enhanced quality in order to have more sales. Those techniques are called Six sigma, and they helped Motorola to have a better manufacturing and business process. Sonya D. Hill (2012) said that “In this decade Six Sigma will change the world, measuring and improving the outputs of the costumer, helping the company archive their business goals, and be a change makers, in world business.” (Hill, 2012).

There are some important reasons why businesses should use the Six Sigma methodology. The first point is that Six Sigma helps operation managers looking for a continuous quality improvement. It also helps companies improve their products, processes, services, quality, price, lead time and on-time delivery. This philosophy is changing the world of business; companies are looking for better quality because the customer ideas are constantly changing. The Six Sigma Kaizen proposal recommends starting with a successful pilot plan that shows the benefits of the implementation. Experience has shown that many times the training processes have made the processes long, tedious and expensive, without the management being able to quickly see the results that are urgently needed.

As proof of how Six Sigma is benefitting companies, I will share how Morinda Inc. is applying this philosophy.

For the past 10 years David Bird has been working as a Global Supply chain manager in Morinda Inc. supervising the products processes in all of Latin America. His objective is to use prudent analysis to find the bottleneck in the process in order to raise the quality of each product and have better sales results. David Bird explains how the Six Sigma helps realize the goals of his team, and therefore the goals of the Morinda Inc. Doing an interview for him provides us with proof about the benefits of applying Six Sigma in the business. David Bird said that:

“Morinda, Inc., due to our distribution structure, has in recent years focused principally on identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement through Lean Management to reduce ‘muda’ (unnecessary or non-value added). However, recently Morinda, Inc. has begun to move away from Lean Manufacturing towards Six Sigma to achieve stable and predictable results in both business and manufacturing practices. Brainstorming has proven very effective and has resulted in brilliant ideas from people that we least expected. For example, brainstorming resulted in Morinda, Inc. making the decision not to be the first company to have a vendor manufacture a product with a new machine. This decision saved us millions of dollars in defective product that couldn′t be sold.” (Bird, 2019)

Probably the biggest advantage to Six Sigma as compared to Lean Manufacturing is that it focuses primarily on the customer′s satisfaction by ensuring that the product is defect free.

However, there must be a balance between the number of acceptable defects and the cost of reducing those defects, as extreme quality assurance measures to reduce defects can affect profitability adversely.

Also during the interview, I realized that Morinda Inc. has only implemented a portion of Six Sigma, and it was only implemented within the past year. Therefore, they have yet to see the expected increase in sales, but expectation is high. If their expectations are met, their anticipation is that they will get approval to implement the full Six Sigma.

If Six Sigma really guarantees the efficiency in its procedures, decreases the cycle times and improves customer service, then what are we waiting for to be successful?