Six Sigma Not Yet Widely Adopted in Ireland

Paul O’Brien of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who recently held a seminar on Six Sigma in Dublin, has commented that despite Six Sigma’s success in companies who have implemented it in the U.S. and Europe, the business strategy has not yet been widely accepted in Ireland.  The difficulty has been that many Irish executives have percieved the process as merely American jargon and thus have not investigated it or simply regarded it as useless.  The key to wider adoption, according to O’Brien, is the incorporation of a limited project which will allow a company to see the benefits of Six Sigma without exposing them to the heavy investment which full incorporation of the program requires. SiliconRepublic.com Reports:

“So far, it has mainly been American, British and some European banks that have implemented Six Sigma. For example in the UK, JP Morgan, one of the first banks to work with this, had a huge amount of success with the deployment. Irish banks are beginning to look at Six Sigma or at least at facets of it. I know of one bank that has deployed an element of it in branch banking.” He notes that other banks to deploy the technique include the Irish subsidiaries of US banks such as Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch that have “inherited” the Six Sigma projects from their parent firm.