Know-How Exchange : Strategy

I have a 6 sigma green belt and lost interest to pursue further.

I dated a 6sigma guru, who admits his 6 fig consulting gig -- he's just riding it out. I'll give you his name offline-- but don't tell anyone I told you who he is or I gave you his name.

But there are co's that swear by it. Like HP-- and Armstrong - I toured their facility about 3 hours from Houston. Armstrong's conference tracks in plain view their 6 sigma improvements.

I'd start with some of their guru's and get a feel if they are ready for "real work". They might be ready to embrace something new. They already have the contacts- and know where the bodies are buried.

Go to Armstrong as it's kind of in your backyard- it's a lovely 3 hour drive!!

Hi Randall,

I fully agree with your position; and always remind clients that 'doing the right things' is at least as important as 'doing things right', and that being vaguely right is much better than being precisely wrong; the danger of many Six Sigma like initiatives

Struggling a bit though to define the exact question you are asking us. Can you clarify?

Cheers

Koen

Randall,

If your client has a new take on an existing space, there are proven ways to crack that nut... speaking, teaching, writing papers, blogging, sharing, free seminars, webinars, etc. All of which WILL work if executed well, promoted effectively, and if the product really is a new and better thing.

If what you're asking is for a magic bullet, I don't have one.

As you point out, there is saturation out there (and I think some backlash and fatigue) regarding Six Sygma processes. A collegue of mine left a heavily invested SS environment and said she hadn't realized how potent the kool-aide was until she wasn't drinking it anymore... So I recommend finding ways to give people a moment of clarity, a moment without kool-aide.

If your client has the money, recruit 200 Six Sygma practicioners to a free one-day seminar. Cut them off from their kool-aide for a day and preach/teach/show them the truth.

If you have it packaged, sell it there. If you don't, use the attendees or RSVPs as your initial target list to personally sell the consulting services of your client's firm (or whatever form the new wonderfulness is going to take... you didn't specify :)

Best of luck!
--
Mandy Vavrinak
Crossroads Communications

It seems that the prospects for your new client are businesses that have spent the time & money going through these various programs and have seen dwindling results (since they're likely to have the resources for additional training).

So, create follow-on programs for each of these programs, called informally "Six Sigma: The Next Step" or "Leaner/Agiler Futures". The point being you want to transition them from their older way of thinking (which had some value to them in the past) to your client's perspective (which hopefully they can document extensively). Don't nullify prospect's choice of 6 Sigma (etc.) - show them a better way to apply their knowledge.

While doing some quick research, I found a lot of businesses doing just this (such as the following), but none of them looked strong B2B online:
https://six-to-twelvesigma.com/
https://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/03/05/seven-sigma-is-officially-a-co...

A way of tapping into the frustration with these programs would be PPC. For example, "Six Sigma Sucks": https://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/six_sigma_sucks.html
Also, the blogs where people comment on what they hated about these programs are natural places to extol your client's better option.

Finally, why not try something high-profile? Approach a company that would be an ideal target, and have two divisions of the company compete. Have a face-off training. Train one in your-choice-of-management-strategy and the other in your clients'. Provide regular (free) support, and measure the results (using a number of variables). Show the results weekly (publicly) using agreed upon metrics. You'll have a bang-up of a case study and great word-of-mouth within the industry you target.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused. Are you talking about implementing the concept within your client company, or is your client company trying to create and promote a new management technique?

If your client is attempting to promote a new management technique, I would ask you to keep in mind that companies have budgets for six Sigma, may have budgets for LEAN, they have budgets for ISO 9000, and so forth. Companies generally do not have budgets for "wild new management strategy". As a practical matter, it would probably be easier to get consulting assignments (if that is what you are looking for) by offering an improved implementation of one of these management nightmares, rather than an academic and intellectual argument with those who have no budgets or authority.

Some companies have made major investments in these techniques, and will probably be more receptive to an improvement in process rather than a forklift upgrade.

Randall

I am concerned that if your client simply attacks one particular methodology like Six Sigma (that has large numbers both of evangelistic advocates and vehement opponents, incidentally) they will be missing the point. Six Sigma is all about cutting down errors. It has nothing to do with making the organisation work effectively.

Fake work is not the point. It's just a symptom of failing or bad execution.

What is the point is that organisations should make every effort to avoid doing things - any expense or activity - that does not have some connection to achieving the organisation's stated objectives.

A lot of consulting firms use the term 'strategic alignment' to describe an organisation that is operating in an effective AND efficient manner. Problem is, client firms all think they ARE strategically aligned until you get inside and start highlight the things they are doing that are wasteful. Worse still, they ignore the gaps in their own execution that are causing the strategy to fail.

I have never yet met a client who wanted to buy a consulting project to create alignment. Clients do not buy alignment. They do, however, buy projects in 'the latest new thing'. Especially if it's been published in HBR.

What your client needs is a way to package a service that looks through the organisation on a holistic basis, identifying execution gaps, and duplicated or non-strategic activities or expenses. In the old days that used to be called 'identifying waste' and even 'cost cutting', but those terms are manifestly inadequate, and do not properly identify the benefits of the work that would be delivered.

In my experience of strategic and business planning work, and in following through on the implementation, I find many organisations are quite good at working out how to implement and execute strategy.

However, they fail at managing it - they don't isolate and shut down unnecessary work and activities that are not contributing to the execution of the current plan, and sometimes they leave process gaps that cause the execution to fail.

Hope that helps.

ChrisB

Dear Randall

I’m a bit perplexed about this question, possibly because the words which you use like process and procedure are the key terms we use in looking at sales performance management. Likewise for efficiency and effectiveness because it’s great to be highly efficient, but if you are loyally following procedures which are ineffective in securing your business goals then that, as a process is crap!

Six Sigma seems to have developed something of a mystique about itself – perhaps because it is usually implemented by some Very Intelligent Wonk from IBM or McKinsey on about $3,000 a day or an hour. Originally it had little to do with the overall efficiency of a company. It was a quality standard used by Motorola to define an acceptable level of faults which would be tolerated by their manufacturing operation. More critically, it also defined an iterative process by which these faults would be identified and then reduced in number, presumably with the benefit of improving a company’s efficiency in the process.

The 6 in Six Sigma refers to plus or minus 3 standard deviations from the statistical norm in Gaussian histogram of the quality of a product as measured by some physical parameter such as size or weight or resistance. That means that to say “I don’t believe in Six Sigma”, is like saying, “I don’t believe in statistics” or worse “I don’t believe in gravity” It’s the current manifestation into which it has grown which causes all the problems.

I think that it’s the interpretation and use that those statistics which has turned out a bit dodgy. If the practitioners of what has grown into Six Sigma as we know it today had built less of a cult, less of a religion or a mystic eastern martial art around “Plus or minus three lots of the standard deviation of a Gaussian distribution = OK; four lots of the standard deviation = Trouble” then we’d be better able here to have a rational discussion on the matter.

Green belts and Black belts my arse – I pulled Cameron out of a Judo course because they gave belts away like sweeties. Now he does Karate where achievement is won by skill, work and application. We get knocked black and blue, but in the end it’s worth it.

Go back to the basics of what you are looking for – Six Sigma referred simply to the measurement of process capability and defined that capability (For Motorola, by the way) as being 3.4 defects per million opportunities to measure a defect on a finished product. It then went on to define a feedback mechanism which would flag, in real time, the errors and their cause. It then set out to correct whatever it was which produced flawed product. If that proved too expensive or unrealistic it asked managers to consider whether their tolerances were appropriate for manufactured product in the real world.

Six Sigma successes can be legitimately achieved by varying the permitted error margin as long as the resulting part still functions according to customer expectations.

I once had a huge piece of Automatic Test Equipment which checked out the electronics of wide-screen TV’s before they were assembled. The problem was, that when set up to the specification which came out of development it failed about 90% of production as out of tolerance. Could we make it more accurate and fasted so that they could iron these things out?

Well, yes we could and no we wouldn’t. I asked, “Why did development specify 2% components when manufacturing specified 10% components. (2% components by the way would have produced a TV which cost about $22,000!) Our machine could measure to 1% so little wonder that 90% of product was rejected.

Did the rejected circuit boards work?

They did

Could we just bang in 10% tolerances into all our algorithms then to see what happens.

Well, 99.7% passed with the new setting. They made 1000 TV’s with them and all 1000 of them worked as expected.

Go back to basics on this and separate out quality issues from feedback issues from process engineering issues, from procedures, from processes and from optimization and you might then just have a means of hooking the client on something which they both understand and can benefit from. Always remember that Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing and JIT are all part of quality and logistics. None of them in themselves define whether staff and managers are pissing around.

Best wishes


Steve
PS There’s more of this if you want it!!!

We look at most of the issues in this posting in sales performance management. It started off with forecasting, but as that impacted on all areas of a company’s operations then we had to be able to extend our consultancies into areas of ERP. That is the end result of what you are discussing here and it is difficult to be definitive about where one competence ends and another deeper discipline starts.

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and it does not necessarily stand for SAP systems or operational research or linear programming, though those are the tools often used. Proctor and Gambol use a team of 250 blokes with PhD qualifications in maths to hone their logistics, forecasting and supply management, reaping about £1.8 Billion in additional profits as a result. Logica, and IBM for example offer the same to smaller operations but the bill is usually in the millions.

SME’s usually tag along with a bit of this and a bit of that with a healthy dose of “Don’t know what the shit I’m doing, but here goes” which is why we get this rubbish talked about Six Sigma and other quality disciplines, simply because they sometimes offer a nearly affordable introduction to process optimisation and ERP.

Your client seems to have a decent starting point but they also seem to have grasped the wrong end of a very expensive stick. Six Sigma forces users to look at the problems which impact upon shipping acceptable product. Quality control used to consist of a bloke in a white lab coat measuring things on a production line and rejecting them. A month or two later, his rejects would be looked at, a few people would be chastised and told to pull their fingers out and that would be it.

Some smart guy decided that quality control was better for the organisation if it incorporated sorting out the causes for rejection as and when the problems were discovered. Defining a quality standard to which you could work in the UK was the job of British Standards and in Europe, ISO. BS 5750 was the quality standard in the UK and elsewhere it was ISO 9000 / 9001. Most companies had to implement these standards if they wanted to continue selling things but there still persists the myth that they lay down standards and tolerances to which industries should work.

They don’t. They lay down procedures for monitoring and then correcting quality issues as and when and how they occur. So rather than be seen as a necessary evil, reducing throughput and adding to the cost of scrapped items, they were positive business benefits which would lead a company to get things right the first time round and thus be more efficient at manufacturing. Because they had to be aligned to buying, manufacturing, marketing and sales they also had the potential to impact the effectiveness of an organisation in achieving its stated goals.

Six Sigma is a tolerance standard, which defines actions (feedback) which must be taken as real-time measurements reveal non-optimal product reaching the end of a production line. That’s it!

What you are moving into is process optimisation and ERP, whereby Six Sigma techniques reveal operational flaws and impose a requirement on management to do something about them. How that is achieved has little to do with quality control but a lot to do with ERP.

This concept of fake work and other aspects of waste have little to do with Six Sigma. The only false work associated with a quality programme is the antediluvian concept of employing people to correct faults so that product can be shipped – without correcting the cause of the problem resulting in the same problem occurring in the next batch.

Where spurious streams of work have become entrenched in a company, it often has little to do with the narrower definition of quality issues but they are encompassed by the wider concepts encouraged by ISO 9000. For example, if a process requires the repeated entry of the same data into different systems (Sales, Accounts, Service and Production) then it is an unnecessary process overhead. If an existing process involves the re-entry of pre-existing data, such as in service and then the manual entry of further information (What the fault was) the entry of some billable information (What repair was carried out) then clearly these are quality issues, but they concern the quality of the process.

They impact on the customer because they result in delays and errors. Even worse, it can result at the end of a month in a pile of orphaned products which have become separated from their paperwork which need repatriating to their owners and the owners need billing. If this has to be done by looking up the owner from the serial number on the case, by cross reference to a paper file, then the company will have lost its profit and the customer will have suffered an unnecessary delay.

We approach all of these issues by asking what is causing the pain in the process at the moment. Most manufacturing and sales organisations are complex, but essentially they can be broken down into component parts which are relatively easy to understand and can be optimised in isolation. The world is unfortunately not linear and not without feedback and interactions, so you can’t just add these idealised systems and their respective optimisations together and say “Here’s the optimal analysis for your whole company” In the same way that you can’t do a 1 week weather forecast for a country by adding up 1000 regional forecasts for the next 24 hours, you cannot extrapolate the result for the whole from the sum up the parts.

But you can go a long way towards this by taking those parts which are measurable and are calculable and doing as much as possible with that information. Then you can incorporate a self-correcting quality discipline such as Six Sigma to address losses on the production side and sales forecasting to address buying shortfalls, manufacturing overhangs, and unacceptable lead times and over or under stocking of finished product.

If any of these processes flag up situations which are untenable, then this is not necessarily an error, it is probably a consequence of the fact that your forecasting, planning and quality improvement systems are limited and beyond their limits are fallible. Big ERP says do another shed-load of programming and get the algorithms right in future. This is a load of bollocks because rather like the long-term weather forecast it won’t work.

Instead, into all processes insert a human being. They are called managers. Ask that manager of every decision which the “System” comes up with “Is this realistic?” “Is this tenable?” “Can I foresee any problems which the equations have missed?”

Then you have a blend of technology and management expertise which is pretty hard to beat. Believe it or not, that is what Unilever does. “This must be right because 50 guy’s with PhD’s in maths and logistics say so” is countered by, “Yes, but not in Ramadan” by a regional manger.

Start with what is causing the pain, split out the different threads, treat each in isolation to analyse cause and effect, apply the appropriate maths, look at the interim results, throw half the things away and you will probably have a useable process improvement programme which will work.

Best wishes


Steve
Xspirt