Six Sigma Blog

Six Sigma and the Delivery Boys

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Delivery boys (or men) lecturing to business graduates at India’s premier management institution – believe it or not, it’s fact not fiction.

It’s an amazing success story, one that even Forbes Global picked up a few years ago. The term Six Sigma does not come to mind when one thinks of lunch boxes and their delivery – but one delivery service in India has managed to garner a Six Sigma rating on par with Motorola. The Mumbai Dabbawallahs, or members of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers’ Association, have earned fame with their “perhaps one mistake every two months” out of the 170,000 lunch boxes they deliver everyday across offices in Mumbai. With a complicated, yet simple, coding system for each box, the delivery men get hot, home-cooked food to office-goers at lunch time, and deliver the boxes back to their homes before they get there themselves after the day’s work.

The president and secretary of the dabbawallahs’ association will talk to the students of the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, about the efficiency of their supply chain, at the school’s annual operations seminar, “Opus,” on the topic “India Inc. – From Sustenance to Operational Excellence.”

The Significance of Six Sigma

Why is Six Sigma so important in the improvement process? We talk of Six Sigma level implementations having an accuracy of 99.99966 percent. Do we need to be so accurate? Isn’t it enough to be accurate, say, 99 percent of the time? Well, after reading the following statistics compiled by the American Society for Quality, you will agree that it definitely is not!

Being 99 percent accurate means that:

• As many as 50 babies are dropped in hospitals every day.
• There is no electric power for nearly 7 hours every month.
• Every hour, at least 20,000 letters are lost in the mail.
• Over 200,000 errors are made in medical prescriptions on an annual basis.
• Every week, doctors botch up 5,000 surgeries.
• Major airports report 2 incorrect landings every day.

Now, doesn’t that 0.99966 percent sound worthwhile?

Failure and Six Sigma

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer   

Does the deployment of Six Sigma techniques mean that the organization is bound to achieve its objectives? Do Six Sigma initiatives ever result in a failure? If so, what are the reasons for the same? Mike Carnell provides answers to these questions on the ISix Sigma site.

First of all, he explains that no company will be willing to broadcast the fact that their Six Sigma implementation was a total failure, not after spending so much time and effort on it. Secondly, the word “failure” can be redefined according to the company’s terms. Carnell defines it as:

Anything that does not deliver the Return On Investment (ROI) required by the company for any other investment.

He also states that Six Sigma decisions are just like all others – if things do not go according to plan, tweak the plan a little according to the metrics that show up.
To see how Six Sigma deployments fail to meet expectations, follow this link.

Six Sigma and Organizational Size

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Though the implementation of Six Sigma principles is fundamentally the same in all organizations, there are a few subtle differences during deployment.

Smaller companies with employees who are not very experienced face added expenses if they cannot afford to spare a full-time change agent. The lack of experience of employees also necessitates more training and coaching. The absence of a Master Black Belt on site may result in the project reaching a stand-still. At times, daily operations may have to be put on hold so that the larger good, i.e., the improvement through Six Sigma, can be realized.

Not all the differences between Six Sigma deployments in small and large organizations are negative though. Smaller companies adapt to cultural and organizational changes more easily. Introduction, and then implementation, of the new methods are therefore more successful. Employees at smaller concerns are usually jacks of all trades, which helps them understand the workings of most parts of their organizations rather than focusing on just their area of specialization.

Positive change is what Six Sigma is all about, and any organization that adapts to change quickly, is bound to be breeze through the deployment stage.