Six Sigma Blog

Six Sigma Tips for Financial Service Providers

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Organizations that offer financial services are set to benefit from the book, “Six Sigma for Financial Services: How Leading Companies are Driving Results Using Lean, Six Sigma, and Process Management”, authored by Rowland Hayler, Vice President of International Operations at Pivotal Resources and Michael Nichols of Nichols Quality Associates and formerly Director of Six Sigma Design at American Express. The book details how the principles of lean and six sigma can be leveraged by financial service providers to improve their business results. Besides providing examples and illustrations, the book includes practical applications at various high-profile organizations such as American Express, Bank of America, Barclays Stockbrokers, Development Bank of Singapore, Fidelity, First Data Resources, ICICI Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds TSB, and Wachovia. ISix Sigma reports:

“The book gives a thorough explanation of the rationale for business process excellence within the financial services industry,” says Hayler. Nichols continues, “The methods described provide a clear and simple structure to enable readers to build their knowledge on how to become a world-class financial services organization within today's complex global business environment.”

Understanding the principles of ‘Lean’ and 'Six Sigma'

Do you know what ‘Lean’ is in business processes? Have you tried incorporating lean principles into any of your business processes to ward off the cost incurred via non-value and redundant processes?

Lean principle is a set of defined rules that assist in speeding up any business process by cutting off the redundant and non-value adds processes which unnecessarily emaciate quality time. Lean principles start with by finding the lead time involved in any business process. ‘Lean’ principles constitute tools and mechanisms to avoid non-value add processes thereby speeding up the pace of the current project.

Six Sigma is a methodology that operates on DMAIC principle thereby solving defects existing in a business process. It does not however contain any tool to accelerate the process under consideration.

In brief, Lean principles reduce the lead time and speed up the process while Six Sigma practice helps in ensuring the quality of the business process.

Read one of our previous post on 'Lean Six Sigma' to know how companies have embraced the concept of Lean Six Sigma to cut out waste and increase productivity while sustaining quality!

Incorporating Lean Principles into Six Sigma

By Priya Venkatesh, Staff Writer

Do you want to integrate lean principles and six sigma processes? Are you not clear with the thin line between six sigma and lean principles? Read on to know more details.

The steps that involve in the incorporation of lean principles to six sigma business processes can be summarized as follows:

• Try to stretch the malleable business processes and start applying lean principles to the stretched business process.
• Resolve the defects that are currently present in the business process.
• Make sure that the consistency in quality of the defect removal is taken care of while moving on to the removal of the next defect.
• If in case the business process is not malleable, try solving the defects by applying six sigma tactics and then start applying the lean principles.

Read one of our previous post titled "Applying Lean Manufacturing to Six Sigma" to know more on applying lean principles to Six Sigma processes in detail.

A quality companion for Six Sigma professionals

The biggest challenge for professionals in any field is to manage and execute their projects in the best possible way. Things are no different for Six Sigma practioners, and they are constantly on the lookout for a technical aid to help them achieve their objectives. In an older post, I have mentioned how a new tool can help Six Sigma experts.

Quality Companion 2, the new release from Minitab Inc., is one such software. Quality Companion weaves seamlessly with Minitab® Statistical Software and helps Six Sigma professionals to extract the most out of their quality improvement programs by streamlining project workflow, guiding Six Sigma Green Belts and Black Belts, providing linked tools for better analysis and reports, and standardizing projects throughout the organization.

According to a press release:

At the start of a project, Quality Companion's Project Roadmap(TM) feature lets professionals plan out every phase in detail, then assign built-in "soft" tools to assist with each task. These tools help team members brainstorm, map processes, conduct analyses, complete forms and reports, and more. With Quality Companion's data-sharing ability, the information they enter in one tool populates the appropriate fields in other tools, with no retyping.