Six Sigma is a methodology that has brought significant improvements to many companies in a variety of sectors. And it looks like we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible when Six Sigma is applied correctly. Customer service is an area that’s notoriously difficult for companies to get right.

Even when you’re prepared to invest a lot of resources into your customer service, that’s still not a guarantee that you’re going to see good results. You also have to apply a controlled approach to optimizing your performance and service quality. That’s where Six Sigma comes in – let’s have a look at what it can do for you in this regard, and how to put it to proper use.

Assessing Your Current Situation and Goals

In order to utilize Six Sigma in your customer service setup, you must start by analyzing your current situation. Six Sigma works with measurable metrics, and the more of those you can gather, the better results you can expect. Try to gather as much information as you can about your operations.

How many customers you’re servicing in a given period, hours with heavy load, satisfaction rates, call duration, and anything else that might be relevant. All of those details will help you build a picture with which you can objectively measure the current performance of your customer service. This will help you figure out which areas need to be addressed with a higher priority.

Implementing Improvements

With the help of Six Sigma, you can then start addressing issues that require urgent attention. Customer service problems tend to be concentrated in a few specific areas – like response time and service quality – and you will probably want to start with those. Any improvements you make should be quantifiable. That is, you should be able to measure their impact in an objective manner. This will help you ensure that you’re moving in the right direction. It will be a particularly important point when it comes to addressing waste. Six Sigma puts a strong emphasis on that, and it’s something that requires a lot of concrete data in order to work.

Measuring Results and Iterating

After you’re done implementing your changes, you should measure how they impact your operations. Some of the modifications you’ve made may not play out exactly as you intended, and they might actually reduce your productivity in some cases. This makes it important to pay attention to metrics, and make adjustments as needed. Don’t expect everything to be perfect from the first iteration. You’ll likely need to revise your implementation a few times before it works correctly.

If you play your cards right, Six Sigma can result in noticeable improvements to your customer service. It will take some time for the changes to start registering, especially if you’re dealing with a larger operation that generates more data. But once those improvements have materialized, their impact will be permanent. And you’ll have a lot of valuable data to work with that can help you improve things even further by iterating on your current situation.

Learn more about our training and courses

The post How Six Sigma Can Improve Your Customer Service appeared first on 6sigma.

Remaining Efficient in Customer Service as the Company Grows

While every business must always strive for expansion, it’s not that straightforward to maintain the right kind of progress on all fronts of the organization. Customer service and support is especially tricky and has to be approached very carefully if you want to avoid seeing your company crumble under its own weight.

The good news is that the modern market offers plenty of solution in this regard, and you have various options for creating adequate service channels that will keep all your customers happy. It’s just up to you to get started with applying these ideas in the first place.

Requirements Will Change

As your company grows, the requirements of its users are going to change. In some cases, that change can be significant and can impact various aspects of your operation in unpredictable ways. You have to stay on top of that and anticipate these changes as they come out. More than that, you have to stay in touch with the way your customers think, and always know what they want at any stage of your operations.

This might sound straightforward, but one of the biggest problems many companies tend to experience with regards to their growth is losing touch with the needs of their customers. If you want to prevent this from happening to you, you’ll need to very carefully study the changes in their requirements.

Six Sigma Can Be Useful

Six Sigma has established itself as a solid tool for addressing various performance and optimization issues. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that it’s also quite useful when it comes to improving a company’s customer service capabilities. It can take some time to integrate the ideas of Six Sigma into your workflow properly, especially if you lack the appropriate specialists at the moment. But in the end, it’s going to be one of the best changes you can do to your organization in order to maintain its efficiency at a high level.

Efficiency Has Many Forms

Keep in mind that you have various ways of being efficient in servicing your customers, and you shouldn’t always go for the low-hanging fruit. In some cases, you stand to gain a lot from making people pay more attention to your self-service options, for example. In other cases, you should think about delivering accurate results over solving problems fast. Some industries have a very heavy demand for speedy customer service, but in other cases, you can gain more from improving the accuracy of your results instead. It’s highly individual for each industry, and you have to pay attention to the specific requirements of the field you’re working in yourself.

Setting Your Priorities Straight

This brings us to another very important point. You’ll need to prioritize different aspects of your customer service in different situations if you want to ensure that people stay satisfied in the long run. And it’s also going to take some experimentation until you discover which parts of your operations should receive the most focus in those cases. But in the end, those results will be very valuable, and you won’t regret taking the time to sort things out on that front.

This will be especially important later on when the scale of your company might prevent you from making the right decisions because you won’t have access to the full picture. Knowing what your priorities should be from early on is going to be crucial in that case, and it can be of great help in optimizing your operations overall.

Expansion is something that can be very dangerous to an organization if it’s not handled correctly. At the same time, it’s also something that you will have to go through sooner or later, and there’s no way around that. And it’s obviously much better to approach it with a prepared mindset, rather than scrambling to figure out how everything works in the last moment. The only companies that manage to survive their major expansion periods are those that have taken the necessary precautions to prepare for them in the first place. The rest are bound to get swept under, but in the end, that’s how the market works in general, and it’s something you should always be prepared for and anticipate.

The post Remaining Efficient in Customer Service as the Company Grows appeared first on 6sigma.

Are You Meeting Your Customers’ Expectations?

Many companies suffer from a common problem a misunderstanding of the expectations of their customers, and as a result, a poor understanding of how well they’re meeting them in the first place. It’s not hard to see examples of that all around us, and this trend can be traced back to a number of factors. Perhaps the most prominent one is that leaders simply don’t know how to evaluate their customers’ expectations, and how to adapt to any changes in them.

Times Are Changing

We’re going through some very interesting times right now in terms of customer service, products, and other similar factors. The expectations of people are changing fast, and it’s becoming more and more common to expect fast, reliable services that are delivered on-demand. On the other hand, not every company can meet these expectations in their current state, at least not without some serious changes in their operations.

Expanding Safely

Every company needs to keep an eye on possible expansion opportunities at all times. At the same time, it can be difficult to ensure that you’ll keep growing in the right direction and won’t have to face certain obstacles along the way. Safe expansion is even more difficult when you don’t want to compromise the results you’re delivering to your customers. You have to make sure that any sort of new development in your business enables you to deliver more reliable and consistent results, even if it means temporarily compromising another aspect of your operations.

Analyzing Your Progress

How well are you currently doing? Many business leaders tend to have some misconceptions about that, often thinking that they are moving in the right direction when they are not. This is why it’s so important to constantly analyze your progress and see how well you’re doing in objective terms. Don’t just guess this is the fast track to making wrong decisions. At the same time, try to look at that data through a slightly critical lens as well. Sometimes data won’t reveal the full picture, and you’ll have to rely on your own experience and expertise to fill the gaps.

Improvements in the Right Areas

You need to make sure that any improvements you’re making are hitting the right areas of your operations. This is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you have a larger organization that is involved in multiple different operations. You have to make sure that all of your actions actually boost your future prospects. And when you’re using proper data analytics and collection as we described above, you should be able to spot the areas for improvement much easier than if you’re working with any other kind of data.

Preparing for the Future

It’s hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to a complex organization with multiple departments and fronts of operation. But it’s important to have at least some vague idea of how things are likely to develop a few years from now, maybe even longer. Because this will determine to a large extent how you’re changing your company’s current state, and that in turn will become extremely important later on when you’re trying to adapt your actions to the current state of the market.

If you’ve been doing well on the data collection front, you should have a lot to work with. But your job is not done yet you have to also ensure that you’re aligning any trends in that data to your current situation. In other words, some details that you’ve gathered years ago may no longer be relevant in your current situation, and it’s important to have the capacity to tell when this is the case.

The post Are You Meeting Your Customers’ Expectations? appeared first on 6sigma.

Why It’s Never Too Late for Innovative Approaches

One of the worst things you could do to your organization is to shy away from innovation because you believe that the company is too far gone for that. And while that might be true in a very small number of cases, those are usually extreme examples where the writing is on the wall for quite some time.

In most cases, you can never go wrong with considering a bit more innovation in your operations. And there are plenty of opportunities for that nowadays as well. You just need to keep your eyes open and explore what the market offers on a regular basis.

The Market Is Always Moving

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re involved in. The market you’re dealing with is likely highly dynamic and requires constant attention if you want to keep up with its trends. This means that you can’t count on today’s methods to still be viable tomorrow. That’s something many leaders realize all too late and end up pushing their companies in the wrong direction stubbornly until they can go no further.

You Can Always Benefit from an Improvement

This brings us to our next point. Even if you don’t see any point in innovating heavily in your current state, you can pretty much always benefit from improving things in this regard. Think about it is there really a downside to improving production rates or decreasing the frequency of manufacturing errors? In most cases, there isn’t.

Even if it’s a small change, it can often impact your operations in a major way. You should not underestimate the potential of certain improvements for transforming the entire state of your operations in the long run. It starts with small changes, and they can add up over time.

Long-term Benefits Can Add Up Fast

And that’s another important factor to consider. Even if you don’t see any results in the beginning, you’d be surprised how fast those can stack up over time. Small changes can become very pronounced given enough time, and sometimes the right combination of a few small factors can completely alter your perspective on your production and other aspects of your organization.

Of course, this is not valid for absolutely every small change you can make. But with a bit of exploration and experimentation, you’re quickly going to find the right combinations.

Preparing for the Worst

Innovation is not just about improving your current performance. It can also be useful for addressing potential future problems within your organization which may not even be on the table yet. You might not even realize the need for some of those changes until it’s too late. But with the right approach, you can easily protect your company from many types of negative effects over its lifetime, and ensure that you don’t meet the same fate as some of your failing competitors.

On that note, make sure that you analyze the performance of other entities on your market as much as possible. You never know when you might spot an opportunity to prevent a major disaster in your own organization, and often this is about being vigilant and paying attention to how the market is moving.

Evaluating the Impact

If you’re still not convinced that you should make a certain attempt at innovation, you should do a study that evaluates the potential impact of your actions, and use that as a reference to figure out if it’s a worthwhile idea. You should take into account all current factors related to your operations though, not just the ones which have an obvious connection to whatever you’re going to attempt.

Because in some cases, there will be effects that will not be predictable, simply because they are related to patterns in the background that can be too difficult to decipher. Even with some complex analytical systems, you might still miss those connections from time to time. So to be safe, just factor everything you can into your calculations and ensure that you’re looking at the big picture as best as possible.

In the long run, you will never regret taking the time to optimize your operations and look into ways to innovate. But if you want to get the most out of this, you should be patient and consider all possible effects as carefully as possible.

The post Why It’s Never Too Late for Innovative Approaches appeared first on 6sigma.

Pushing a Stagnating Company to Innovation

No company on the market is really insured against the possibility of finding itself in a stagnating situation. And when that happens, many leaders usually instinctively respond by trying to push things forward in full speed, often ignoring some internal safety measures that are there for a reason. It’s important to know what to do when you’re dealing with a situation like this, and more importantly, what not to do. Because in the end, your decisions at this stage of the company’s development can easily impact its whole future.

Getting to the Root Cause

One of the most important things to do first is to identify the root cause of the problem. Often, when a company has issues with stagnation, it can be traced back to a few common causes. A struggling management without a clear vision for the future is often one of the most notable problems, and it can also be difficult to deal with.

It can take some time to properly identify where the problem is coming for, so you should start the investigation process as early as possible. And in every case, make sure that you’re working with as much real data as possible, instead of guesses and estimates.

Small Steps

You shouldn’t expect this to be a fast process. Even if you do everything right at every step, it’s still going to take a while to see the company progressing and moving in the right direction. To this end, you should be patient and be prepared to wait until things pick back up. Don’t try to rush the process at any point, because this can only lead to more issues.

In fact, if you push too hard, you might even stall the whole process. This has happened to various companies in the past and is a common problem that can be difficult to avoid.

Cutting the Dead Weight

You’ll often come to the realization that most of the company’s problems are caused by some dead weight. This can have many different forms, but it has to be dealt with in any case. This can be challenging when it comes to people. If you realize that certain employees are the main factor holding back the progress of your organization, the obvious solution is to get rid of them.

But this can have some unexpected results across the whole organization, and it’s something you should be very careful about. Approach this in a determined, but sensitive manner, and be ready to have lots of hard conversations with your employees.

Tracking Progress

You should also ensure that your actions are having the right effect in the long run. This can only be done with sufficient tracking, data collection and analysis. There are lots of solutions on that front nowadays, and it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with them and figure out how to best integrate them into your own work.

In the end, the important thing is that you end up with an objective overview of your current situation that’s driven mainly by hard data and analytics. This can allow you to move in the right direction much more easily.

Maintaining the Momentum

Another important factor is to ensure that you keep things going after starting once. Momentum can be difficult to attain, but it can make things easier later on if you have been moving in the right direction to begin with. But keep in mind that sometimes you might need to fuel the fire of progress manually in additional steps. It’s not a process that you can just complete once and call it a day. It’s something ongoing that will require a lot of effort from you in the long run.

On the bright side, the effects tend to stack up. So once you’ve got the ball rolling, it can be easier and easier to keep things running in the right direction. And you’ll find that maintaining an innovative approach in your organization is not that hard when you have the right underlying foundation. Once you have things going, you’ll keep discovering new opportunities to maintain the company in a good condition, and you’ll come to many important realizations about what it means to have an innovative company in the first place.

The post Pushing a Stagnating Company to Innovation appeared first on 6sigma.

The modern market is moving in some rather strange directions with regards to the value delivered to the end user through products. It’s more and more common to see companies designing products that fail after a short term, whether intentionally or not. This is sometimes a problem of improper reliability measures in the design, but in other cases it’s because the product/component has not been tested extensively enough.

Design for Reliability (DfR) and Design for Testability (DfT) are two disciplines that can directly address this issue, and familiarizing yourself with them and their potential impact on your operations is a very good idea if you’re having trouble with the long-term value of your products.

Design for Reliability

There are many components to DfR, but the main point is to ensure that your products will continue to operate as expected over a long period of time. Some companies nowadays fail at this on a pretty grand scale, either intentionally or not. There is actually a new trend in the manufacturing world to create products that fail after a specific time, in order to secure future business for the company.

Various studies have continuously shown that this is a very bad approach though, at least as far as the long-term perspective of the company is concerned. The issue is that you’re trading a quick short-term profit for long-term sustainable growth and customer acquisition, and by the time you realize the problems in that approach, it’s often far too late to do anything to reverse the course.

Reliability can come in many shapes and sizes, and in some cases it’s more about the ability to provide long-term support for the product, rather than ensuring it never fails in the first place. This is another common problem in the modern industrial world, with many products being designed and manufactured in a way that if something breaks, the whole system is as good as gone.

Design for Testing

On the other hand, it’s also important to ensure that all designs produced by your facility can be easily verified according to some standards. There are various ways to go about that, depending on the specific industry you work in, and to be fair, in some cases testing is not actually all that important.

But for products with an intended long life cycle, it’s important to make sure that all of their features are up to par with whatever the specification says.

This can sometimes be pretty problematic though, especially if your design doesn’t lend itself to testing that much. There are various ways to promote a more rigid design for testing, and they all depend on the specific line of work you’re in.

For the most part, you’ll want to ensure that the design follows the white box principle as much as possible. That is, details should not be obscured from testers, especially when it comes to the internal workings of the machine/component. Of course, in some cases, resorting to black box designs is inevitable. This is especially true when it comes to designs that reuse third-party components and other elements that are beyond your control.

Sometimes you’ll just be forced to work with their specifications without any real knowledge of what’s going on inside them, and it’s important to adapt to that properly.

Conclusion

There is a lot you can do to provide additional value to the customer with the use of DfR and DfT. However, not every type of product lends itself to this style of work, and you’ll want to make sure that you can integrate these concepts into your own production properly before looking in that direction for possible optimizations.

The post How to Enhance Value Through Design for Reliability (DfR) and Design for Testability (DfT) appeared first on 6sigma.

Benchmarking can play a critical role in the successful ongoing business of an organization. There is a lot to gain from constantly evaluating your products and processes to ensure that they are in line with current industry standards, as well as to see where you stand compared to the competition. There are a lot of intricate details to consider when setting up a benchmarking process in your organization though, and there are some points that can be important to consider.

1. Work with Actual Data

This may seem like an obvious one, but you would be surprised how many companies sometimes miss this point. Just because you have some data sets already collected doesn’t necessarily mean that they are still relevant for your current situation. It’s a good idea to have a system in place that automatically runs a periodic evaluation of the data you are benchmarking against. Depending on where you are getting your data from, this might not always be so straightforward to implement. This also makes it important to ensure that you are in sufficient control of those information channels.

2. Revise Your Benchmarking Processes

Just like your benchmarking data, the processes themselves might gradually become obsolete over time. This is particularly true when working with certain types of advanced technology, such as microelectronics. It might even be necessary to completely rebuild your benchmarking system from time to time in order to keep up with current trends. And yes, this can occasionally mean that it’s not cost effective to keep your benchmarking system fully up to date. It’s a tradeoff you will need to consider carefully.

3. Ensure There Is No Random Variance

Even a small change in details can sometimes throw off your benchmarking results significantly. You should put as much effort as you reasonably can into making sure that the influence of random external factors is kept to a bare minimum. Sometimes you unfortunately can’t do anything to avoid those random deviations, in which case you will have to rely on statistical analysis methods to align the results properly. It can still make sense to work with data with randomness in it, as long as this is accounted for in your main processes.

4. Benchmark Against Yourself

Another point that some may see as obvious, but an important one nonetheless. It’s not only good to know where you stand compared to your competition, but against your own past work as well. This means that you should run benchmarks against old versions of your products where appropriate, and investigate any regressions in the tested variables. Of course it’s not always the case that a new product will improve upon an old one in every parameter, but as long as you have enough knowledge of your specific industry, you should have a good intuition for that in the first place.

5. Don’t Always Make Your Results Public

Sharing your benchmarking results can have various positive effects. It can be a useful marketing tool when the results are impressive compared to your main competitors, for example. However, this data can also be quite valuable to those same competitors themselves, as it lets them know exactly how far behind you they are. This can have some serious implications in the progress of those companies, so be careful. On the other hand, it’s not rare to set up a mutually beneficial agreement with a competitor in which you share results with each other.

6. Don’t Overengineer for the Sake of Benchmarking Results

If your benchmark results are satisfying, you shouldn’t put any unnecessary extra effort into trying to improve them just for the sake of obtaining better results next time. This kind of defeats the point of benchmarking in the first place, which is to let you focus your effort in areas where it truly matters.

7. Store and Organize Your Results Meticulously

Last but definitely not least, appropriate organization of your benchmarking results plays an integral role in the future success of those tests. The more historic data you have available, the better will be able to run comparisons later on. Just make sure that the data is easy to access and sort through it doesn’t matter how detailed your records may be when they are also difficult to navigate.

The post 7 Steps to Better Benchmarking appeared first on 6sigma.

Gather Data and Use It in the Future

One of the most important things you need to do after completing any project within the organization is to collect results. As we said above, it doesn’t matter if the final outcome was what you expected the project could have been a complete failure and yet you can still learn a lot from it. In fact, in many cases, failure actually teaches you a lot more than success, and you have to go through some harsh developments in order to reach a state where things are moving smoothly.

Make sure that you not only collect all the information that’s produced in the experiment, but you also organize it in a way that allows you to easily access and reference it later on. It’s no good having mountains of data if it takes a significant amount of effort to sift through it, especially if not all of that data is directly relevant to the problem at hand.

The sooner you set up some system to collect and organize that data, the better. In most cases though, the way this system works will be completely individual to your current organization and its specific needs, so you’ll have to put some thought into it. Once that system is up and running though, it’s quite easy to iterate on it and improve it as the organization evolves.

Bring up Old Results in New Discussions

Sometimes disagreements can arise when discussing the direction the company should evolve in. This is especially common when the argument is between multiple people with significant amounts of experience behind their backs, and sometimes all sides may have valid arguments, making it difficult to reach a consensus.

Old data can prove very useful here, and this is one opportunity to reinforce previously achieved positive results without making it feel like you’re repeating things for the sake of it. Nobody really wants to go through a data set that outlines exactly how the company failed to reach an important milestone some months ago, but when you are discussing a similar situation, bringing this point up can make all the difference in the tone of the argument.

Of course, the same principle as above applies here as well you have to be careful and selective in the way you’re picking the exact data to discuss at those meetings. If you reference something that’s ultimately irrelevant, this can weaken your overall point and make people more skeptical of data sets that actually matter a lot in the current situation!

Repetition Is Not Always Bad

Last but not least, don’t forget that sometimes it’s definitely not a bad idea to repeat a certain point more than once. This is especially true in cases where there has been a major failure in the organization, but it can sometimes be beneficial to reinforce a positive lesson just as well. If nothing else, it can significantly boost the morale of your employees if you remind them often about the successful parts of their jobs.

Some companies even have structures in place for that, although you don’t have to go that far in order to see good results. Just make sure that people are always made aware when their contributions matter a lot, and on the other hand, if someone makes a mistake, don’t hold it over their head, but ensure that the results are remembered in the future in cases where they are relevant.

Conclusion

Repetition is one of the key components of ensuring that your organization can develop well in the future and take everything you’ve learned into account. It’s not very easy to figure out which lessons are worth repeating and which aren’t, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll find yourself subconsciously picking out the important details from the more mundane ones.

The post How to Reinforce Successful Results Without Unnecessary Repetition appeared first on 6sigma.

Job Relations Training

One of the more complicated aspects of TWI is Job Relations (JR) Training.

JR training teaches supervisors how to handle problems, how to prevent them, and it aids in developing a logical, common sense approach to handling issues, while respecting people.

Companies often try to sweep JR under the rug until they realize they really need it. The truth is, the sooner an organization grabs the bull by the horns and deals with this issue, the more productive it’s going to be in the long run.

In the end, JR can improve the company’s performance in all aspects, as it will result in better communication and a significant reduction of the problems that pop up in the average working day.

Getting everyone on the same level

It’s important that everyone feels equal in the organization. Obviously the hierarchy of control makes it impossible for everyone to be on the exact same level, but there’s a lot that can be done to help employees feel closer to those around them, even their superiors.

It often turns out that employees at the lower levels of an organization are the ones that need this type of training most. It’s critical to ensure that they’re given enough opportunity to experience communicating with people from all ranks, not just those around them.

Feelings of inferiority must be addressed as quickly as possible, and it’s important to treat the JR process as a forum which gives everyone an opportunity to express themselves in this regard.

Rewarding progress

One of the best ways to ensure that the organization will keep moving forward is to make it clear that progress will be rewarded adequately. This is a common problem in some organizations, where employees often don’t feel motivated enough to step up and take the initiative.

If the company makes it clear that all such acts will be noticed and compensated accordingly, this can get everyone involved on a much more personal level. On that note, it’s critical to ensure that those contributions are credited accordingly. If someone played a special role in improving something about the organization’s working process, they should be given credit for it.

Resolving conflict

It’s inevitable that conflicts are going to arise in the course of work of a company. The key to ensuring that they don’t interrupt process is developing a system that can properly address those conflicts, and deal with them at the root before they’ve grown to something more serious.

Once again, openness plays a major role here. Employees have to be given an opportunity to express themselves, in case there is a conflict, and all sides must be heard out equally well. And whatever decision the company decides to take afterwards, it’s critical that it’s communicated properly to the employees involved.

It’s useful to learn from the organization’s past mistakes, too. If a particular conflict keeps coming up more than once, this could indicate a more fundamental problem with the company’s structure, something that can be addressed outside of the conflict mediation sessions.

To that end, the organization must gather a lot of feedback, and ensure that they have an objective picture of the current situation.

Informing employees of problems early on

When something is wrong with the way a particular employee does their job, the organization must communicate that to them clearly and early enough. It’s not rare that employees will not even know that they are causing a problem until it’s too late to do anything in a way that works for everyone.

Avoiding this type of situation is as simple as making sure that employees are always informed about the current status of their work, and are given feedback both when it’s positive as well as negative.

Sometimes the organization will have to create new roles to deal with the problems that arise. This is where HR departments come in, but it’s occasionally also possible to address this issue on a more local level within each department of the company.

Conclusion

The sooner a company implements proper JR, the more improvements they’re going to see in their operations in the long run. Ensuring that all employees are on the same page and are communicating efficiently is key to guaranteeing the success of the company as a whole. And by resolving conflicts early on, the workflow can remain smooth and uninterrupted throughout the company’s existence.

Learn more about TWI >>> 

The post Job Relations Training appeared first on 6sigma.