Will Six Sigma be Relevant for the Future?

Will Lean Six Sigma be relevant in future? One of the most frequently asked questions in recent times? The short answer to the question is "Yes–100%". Those who are practising Lean Six Sigma will agree with my statement. Whenever people ask me this question, I wonder why even get this question. Each industry is with many challenges without the cause being unknown, and Six Sigma is the way out. Having seen the industry from the past 16+ years, I can confidently say that Six Sigma would continue to be in demand for a long time to come. Let me back up with a detailed explanation of how Six Sigma would continue to be useful and relevance in some of the key industries to justify my statement.

While I agree due to Automation of some of the repetitive & transactional activities in BPO & ITES this question of Six Sigma relevancy has been making rounds from 2-3 years now. If someone believes that Six Sigma projects have been limited to repetitive tasks, then that is an incorrect assumption to make. We also need to learn that Automation would be a blessing in a specific industry & would give rise to various other opportunities.

Let's take a step back and look at the Lean Six Sigma outcome once. Lean help you Accelerate the process, and Six Sigma makes the process more Accurate. Speed, Agility and Accuracy are the Buzz words today, with Lean Six Sigma we can look at achieving all of these.

The way Six Sigma will be applied will evolve to solve some complex problems. If we all recollect Six Sigma was predominantly used to solve Quality issues. Slowly Six Sigma application was extended to driving Productivity, Reduce Turn Around Time, Customer Satisfaction. For a decade or so, Six Sigma has been used to Generate Revenue or Accelerate the Revenue generation process. The evaluation of Six Sigma to solve more complex problems would continue.

Let me help you understand how the Six Sigma application would evolve in various industries with or without the technology intervention. I am confident, the examples listed below are limited, and Six Sigma would grow beyond this.

Manufacturing

Though Six Sigma has evolved through Manufacturing, unfortunately not many Manufacturing organizations have embraced Six Sigma completely, Majority of the cases it is all done as stand-alone projects. One of the reasons is the non-availability of data, and Six Sigma is Data-driven. Data collection is a difficult job in Manufacturing, and the accuracy & precision of the Data always remain a question mark. As the world moves towards Industry 4.0 or put Automations coupled with IoT, the availability of data would be abundant & the Data Quality would be a lot better as well which is good news for Six Sigma guys. This will help Manufacturing guys to start looking at improving their output Quality towards Six Sigma standards. Design of Experiments would be far easier to apply, as carrying out experiments with the different experimental designs would be at your fingertips. Manufacturing would gain immensely in terms of Six Sigma usage.

Let me explain with an example, one of the Green Belt approached recently requiring support in his Six Sigma project "Reduction of Noise Levels in Motor" this project has been around for two decades now. I remember working on a similar project almost 14 years back on the same product line.

Please click Is Six Sigma relevant for the future to read how Six Sigma will evolve in other industries likes of BPO, IT/ITES, Food Processing, Healthcare, Agriculture & Startups