How to benefit from Six Sigma Training and Certification?

Six Sigma is a proven process that strives to lead towards the accuracy. These days many organizations are claiming that they are six sigma certified. This has several advantages for the organization as well as the six sigma certified engineers. Certain organizations that are more process oriented have made it mandatory for all the employees that the Six Sigma Certification is mandatory. Of course the organization claiming that it is six sigma certified has many advantage which I will be explaining here such as quality benefits and reputation of the organization and many more. Being a part of such an organization, I would like to share some of the aspects and benefits of being Six Sigma Certification in simple way in this short article.

Before proceeding further with Six Sigma, its essential to understand the meaning of of the term Six Sigma. You will find good definitions for this process everywhere. According to me, the Six Sigma is set of standard and proven Six Sigma tools that we should make use of while dealing with during the project. Six Sigma applies to any software development firms or manufacturing industries.Six Sigma is more of a business process strategy. Six Sigma is a big topic to discuss and cannot be explained in a page, however, I am trying to give a brief overview of Six Sigma.

To best understand the Six Sigma Process, a Six Sigma Project has to be executed initially to understand what is involved in the Six Sigma process. There will be something called a Six Sigma Charter that the people who are going for six sigma certification have to fill up. The project charter comprises of the problem statement and defines the proposed solution.The proposed solution is then implemented using a set of six sigma tools. The six sigma project that you choose could be of a new process (IDDOV- Identify, Define, Develop, Optimize and Verify)  or change in the existing process or a new design or change in the existing design of a software (DMAIC- Define Measure Analyze, Improve and Control)

The real intent of six sigma training is to understand the proven tools and the actual project that you've chosen gets the least attention. However it is equally important to choose a better project to learn Six Sigma tools with accurately defined CTQs (Critical To Cusotmers).

The Six Sigma Tools

The six sigma tools vary as per the kind of the six sigma project that you have chosen either IDDOV or DMAIC. However, I will explain the most important tools involved in both the kind of six sigma project.

Though Process Map

The first and foremost tool is the Thought Process Map (TPM or TMAP). The TPM involves drawing a bubble diagram putting all your analysis thoughts on the problem in hand. The diagram comprises of the bubbles where you will write all your thoughts. This is the diagram where you can capture all the thoughts that come to your mind about the problem you are solving.

Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs and Clients (SIPOC).

The second Six Sigma tool that we learnt was SIPOC which involves diagrammatic analysis of the suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs and Clients. This tool is used to identify the supplier-customer relationships, the customers here could be your internal customers or the external customers

Cause and Effective Analysis

The cause and effective analysis (C & E) tool is used to find the causes of the problems that may occur in your projects. This tool helps you to find out the causes of the problem. There are set of proposed diagrams to draw that aid the analysis of the cause of the problem. This is also called as Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of the problem. The RCA is done by asking the question 'Why?' five (5) times usually to get to the root of the cause. The Root Cause Analysis is not only true for Software Issues, but also for your personal lives, just ask the question 'Why?' to yourselves five times, you are likely to get the cause the problem you are facing.

Quality Functional Deployment (QFD)  

QFD stands for Quality Function Deployment. This tool is applied to transform your customer requirements to design by using some deployment techniques to achieve design excellence.QFD involves drawing a diagram that maps customer requirements to map the design.

Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA)

This tool plays an important role in any project management activities. We used it a lot especially when were taking up design changes and addressing new requirements of our customers. This involves writing up an excel sheet that identifies the what could be the potential failure mode for each change that we are going to do in an existing product design change. A great tool to identify the risks in executing certain user requirements or the design change and more importantly how the identified risks can be mitigated.

Pareto Chart

Pareto chart was not of much help in our projects. Pareto Chart is a frequency of occurrence of an event. This diagram is usually represented by a bar chart.

There are other tools such as Histogram, Value Chain Map etc in Six Sigma process. If needed you may want to explore those too.

The organizational benefits of Six Sigma are

• Quality Standard of an Organization - Helps to gain the customer confidence and increase the reputation of organization claiming Six Sigma Quality product delivery
• High Quality products coming out of an organization
• Employee Motivation
• Strategic Planning
• Effective Supply Chain Management Process
•  Competitive Advantage etc

Conclusion

Six Sigma is a practice that every team has to understand and acknowledge its importance and successfully execute the six sigma tools in the projects. It does really have advantages if used properly. Six Sigma addresses almost all the project management issues in a precise and professional manner. So learning six sigma is easy, but applying it to the work that we do is bit challenging unless we strictly impose six sigma rules in the organization. The basic level of six sigma certification is called as Green Belt Certification (GB) and advanced one is called Black Belt (BB) Certification.