4 Concepts of Six Sigma That Can Help You Achieve Your Objectives at Work

Trying to achieve your objectives at work without a proper roadmap or plan in place is pure insanity. This is the same as going into a battle expect to emerge victorious without taking any weapons with you.

There are 4 concepts of Six Sigma that will help you emerge victorious in battle and this article will talk about them. Not only can these concepts be used to make improvements in how a person works, but they can also be used to achieve personal objectives as well.

1. Have a clear picture of the necessary improvement you need to make

When you say to yourself that you want things to be better this year, just simply saying it won’t cut the mustard. Some tough questions need to be asked like what areas do you want to improve? You have to set a realistic goal that has a starting point as well as an end.

If you are working in an organization, do you want to increase revenue? If you are very specific with what you want to achieve, you give yourself a big chance of achieving your objectives.

2. Don’t have a tunnel vision, expand your mind

There is a very famous expression that says knowledge is power and for anyone who wants to achieve their objective, having a tunnel vision doesn’t help. It means that you won’t be able to see the bigger picture and by expanding your line of sight, one is able to gain more knowledge.

If you are running a successful business, you should be able to measure things like labor cost, revenue as well as customer satisfaction metrics. If the goal of the business at the end of every year is to make more profits than previous years, you need to be in a position to evaluate all the things that will make you achieve that objective.

This includes things like offering customers good quality service, retaining existing customers and offering them discounts on products or services.No matter the chosen method, it has to be broken down into factor that will drive you to get the results you are looking for.

3. Make sure everything is put in a logical way or manner

Take ATM machines, for example, their main purpose is to give customers money after they have made a withdraw. When a large number of withdrawals are made in a day or the money runs out, the bank moves quickly to put the money back.

This is the same approach one needs to have to achieve their objectives. Just like how things move smoothly with the bank, one has to aim to follow suit and make sure everything is done in a logical way. Applying six sigma gives you the biggest chance to achieve your objectives.

4. Reduce any waste that’s in the way

A major goal of Six Sigma as a method is to cut downtime that is wasted while trying to achieve your objectives. When waste is reduced, you will notice that the way that things are done in your organization will speed up. It is used to make things better with the help of what is known as the 5S.

• Sort – Look around the workplace to see if everything is ok and if something is off, dispose of it very quickly.
• Set in order – When that is dealt with, look at what you have left and place each item in its place.
• Shine – This involves systematically cleaning the space you have whether on a weekly, daily or even monthly basis. If you are low on stock, make sure you restock because the two goals in this step are to keep things clean and have a clear view of inventory.
• Standardize – You have to make sure that you put things where they belong after using them while making sure that work colleagues do the same.
• Sustain – Make sure that you schedule a 5S review all the time so that it comes naturally to everyone.

Conclusion

The 4 concepts of six sigma when used well will easily help achieve your objectives at work because you will go into things prepared. Going back to the analogy of going into a battle expect to emerge victorious without taking any weapons with you, Six Sigma ensure you are armed and ready for battle.

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Your restaurant may be running as smooth as clockwork, but you feel that there are things that can be done better. Often, processes that were efficient initially may not run as well as they did. You might discover that your customers are not receiving their food as fast as they like; the wait time for a table could be made shorter. Your employees may also feel that the restaurant isn’t as organized as it could be.

Although these concerns may not have a direct detrimental effect on your business, it is important to optimize your processes to increase customer and employee satisfaction, reduce waste and increase your profits. A key tool used to identify processes that may require improvement and help your restaurant operate at peak efficiency is the SIPOC diagram, an important part of the Lean Six Sigma methodology.

What is the SIPOC Methodology?

Lean Six Sigma is a methodology that is used to get restaurants and other service organizations to eliminate unnecessary procedures within their business processes. While there are several tools used in the Six Sigma methodology which can help your restaurant to identify process defects, the SIPOC diagram is the most efficient means of identifying problems in order to increase staff productivity and improve the quality of service to customers.

The SIPOC diagram is utilized incrementally in the Six Sigma methodology of process improvement during the define’ stage of the project. DMAIC is an acronym which denotes the five phases of a Six Sigma project, namely: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control.

Often, a SIPOC diagram is presented at the very start of the business process improvement process, and has three main goals:

• Helping the restaurant staff and management to define and conceptualize a new or improved process
• Giving a high level overview of a particular process to people who may not be familiar with it
• Bringing staff who are accustomed to outdated methods up to speed with new processes and methods

How Restaurants Populate a SIPOC Diagram

A high-level map of an improved process or activity at the outset of an improvement project is vital in order to get your team to understand the scope of activities. This definition will get you and your staff to agree on the boundaries within which you will work on the project, and is often drawn up in brainstorming sessions.

During such sessions, team members will often fill out a SIPOC diagram starting with the process’ column. This column is deliberately kept simple, generally having only about five steps at most, with each step having an action and corresponding subject.

After your team reaches an agreement on the documentation of a project, you may then move on to define the customers and desired outcome of a process. Starting from the center of the diagram, the team will then work backwards to identify input and supplies.

Details of a Standard Restaurant Service SIPOC Diagram

When related to Lean Six Sigma’s define’ step, the SIPOC diagram helps you to see the broader picture and make it simpler for you to define problems in a process. This tool can be used to find all the elements that are necessary to make improvements to your processes. A sample SIPOC diagram for a restaurant may look like this:

Conclusion

Although Six Sigma has found a home in the manufacturing sphere, most of its principles can be adapted to apply to almost any other business field. It helps organization to focus on what is important, while identifying wasteful procedures. This allows them to continually improve until the waste is eliminated.

Through the use of a SIPOC diagram, a restaurant business can adapt to new scenarios without negatively impacting staff or quality of service offered to customers.

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Working with integrated projects can be a great boost to the productivity of an organization, especially one that deals with multiple talents across many different fields. In those cases, it’s often necessary to align expertise of various different types, which can be very challenging through traditional project organization methods. An integrated project is one that properly integrates the experience of everyone on board in an equal capacity, enabling the organization to reduce waste and improve the efficiency of executing those projects.

The main point is that the goals and interests of the team as a whole should be aligned to each member’s individual experience and objectives. Of course, the system still envisions some sort of hierarchy which drives the process, putting a key designer at the top and so on.

An important distinction between integrated projects and other types of delivery methods is the way in which the results are aligned to the project’s leadership. In most traditional project delivery methodologies, it’s common to see a leadership figure consolidating the different points of view, while in integrated projects, this is brought down to the level of the team itself.

Collaborating on the Same Level

This ultimately means that it’s up to those team members to resolve conflict and align their points of view, something which can end up a bit of a challenge when those team members have experiences in multiple different fields that don’t share too much with each other. That makes it important to ensure that those team members share efforts in equal capacity during the construction process, allowing them to not only identify points of conflict for later resolution, but also providing each team member with an alternative point of view that brings them closer to the others.

A key part of an integrated project are agreements between participants that align them on their roles. It’s important to create rigid relationships where both parties know what to expect from each other, and it’s also important to ensure that those relationships are aligned with each other. These agreements can be developed on multiple different levels for example, they can happen on a project level, or on the other hand, all the way down to agreements between individual contributors.

The important point is that these agreements are kept open and are brought up for discussion between the members of the team, so that any issues with alignment can be resolved early on before the project has moved into a more critical phase.

Sharing Risks and Responsibilities Alike

Another important point to keep in mind is that integrated projects are about sharing all aspects of the project development not just responsibilities but risks as well. This sometimes means that a party might end up bearing responsibility for a failure that is not directly relevant to their expertise, and the way this will work will depend on the agreements we mentioned above and how they are outlined. This makes it even more important to ensure that all team members are properly aligned on what they want to do with the project and what they expect the final outcome to be, because this also forces them to consider the important aspect of how they are going to share the responsibility for each risk involved.

Conclusion

An integrated project has many benefits as a delivery method, and it can be very easy to work with as long as you keep some basic fundamental points in mind. As long as everyone is properly aligned on their tasks and the risks involved in their work, and you make proper use of modern technology to organize the project even better, you should see some pretty good results at the end of the delivery phase.

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Dealing with waste and removing it from every aspect of an organization’s workflow is at the core of Six Sigma, and those with long-running experience in manufacturing can probably immediately point out some of the most common causes of waste that they’ve encountered in their regular work. Knowing what some of those most problematic areas are and learning to avoid them can be invaluable in planning the future of your organization, so any responsible leader should dedicate some of their time to study those common points of failure.

1. Poor communication

A well-functioning plant should propagate knowledge to its intended recipients as quickly as current technology allows for, at least in areas where this knowledge is critical. The controller of a packaging machine doesn’t have to wait to learn the size of an incoming batch if this data can be transferred between the machines themselves and updated in the appropriate registries. Clever use of modern technology can significantly shorten the amount of time needed to make critical events known, which in turn can prevent a huge number of common problems and reduce waste by a large value.

2. Poor documentation

Failing to learn from past mistakes is another common reason for companies to waste a lot of their resources, and more often than not this is the direct result of improperly documented procedures. Everything relevant to the plant’s current operations should be stored in an organized database that’s easy to access in the future and is kept for a long term.

That way, when you run into a problem later on, you can call on past reports to gain a deeper insight into what could have gone wrong. If the company has already dealt with this sort of issue before, you can save a lot of time in the present by ensuring that you don’t repeat previous mistakes when attempting to resolve the problem.

3. Inadequate physical layout

Another point that surprisingly many plant managers fail to realize until too late is that it’s important to have a sensible physical design that allows for seamless future expansion. The last bit is critical and usually the part that gets ignored; your plant may work perfectly at the moment, but if you suddenly face a period of rapid expansion that calls for the construction of new facilities, you might find yourself in trouble if the design isn’t conducive to natural expansion.

Thinking in modules and connecting parts of the company via inputs and outputs is a habit you should work hard on developing, at least if you want to ensure that the organizations you lead can actually have a good chance to grow into something great in the future.

4. Failing to take a dynamic market into account

Just because the current setup worked great last month doesn’t mean that you should leave it untouched indefinitely. Most markets are highly volatile from a producer’s perspective, especially in today’s rapidly moving world.

This means that everything the company does must be coordinated with the current state of the market, and you have to always plan your future moves with forecasts in mind. This should be pretty much obvious to someone with a lot of experience in running successful plants, but you’d be surprised how many people there are out there who completely fail to observe the importance of this idea. In fact, you don’t have to look long to find some companies that would make you seriously question how they are still in operation upon realizing that their operations are based on methods that were made obsolete decades ago.

5. Insufficient training

This kind of problem often becomes most obvious during periods of rapid expansion when large numbers of new employees are brought in. If the organization lacks a proper structure for training new workers and bringing them up to the level of their peers, you’re going to run into some serious slowdowns sooner or later and it likely won’t be later.

What’s even worse about this specific kind of issue is that it takes some time to manifest itself. New workers are hired, they go through a mandatory training period, they settle in their positions, and then once things look like they’ve settled down, trouble starts popping up left and right. Having to restructure the workforce of a production plant at this stage can be disastrous and can quickly lead to the death of the whole company.

6. Inefficient automation

We touched on this above briefly, but it’s an important point that deserves its own section. The modern world of technology offers a huge number of solutions to common problems in production plants, problems that often boil down to needlessly relying on manual work to do tasks that should normally be automated.

This is highly specific for the industry you work in, but you should spend some time consulting with automation experts to find out what processes in your plant can be shortened or removed entirely.

This might make some people unhappy as it could result in a reduction of the total workforce, but in the end, it will still be in everyone’s benefit since the plant will be able to work much more efficiently and trouble-free in the long run.

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Call centers are among the most dynamic types of organizations, and the environment in a place like this can be hectic. They require a lot of precise management in order to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted operation, and of course, to deliver good value to the customer in the end.

Bad handling of customer service is one of the most common complaints among consumers these days, and this is valid for pretty much every industry, so running a good call center can help you stand out from the competition quite a lot. Here are five strategies to improve operations at a call center.

1. Reduce waste in waiting times

Start with the most common complaint long waiting times. This can often be addressed in many unexpected ways when one starts to look at it as the waste it really is. Try to identify where bottlenecks occur, and figure out the root cause for those problems.

Are people often calling with issues that require support from level 2 and beyond, but they have to go through a tedious procedure on level 1 first? Maybe it’s time to introduce a dedicated section for high-level support requests.

Do your employees spend a lot of time looking up information in their manuals? Look for a better solution on the market, one that organizes and prioritizes the material so they always have the most relevant bits right in front of them.

2. Keep all results properly tracked and organized

This leads us to another good point call centers workers are often forced to juggle a lot of information on a regular basis, and they can sometimes get lost in the mess. This gets even more complicated once you throw the results from each support call on top of the pile, and you will want to spend some time thinking about how you can better organize all the data that’s being collected, and make it more accessible for those who need it.

This, in turn, often comes down to knowing how to make good use of modern technological tools, and choosing the appropriate solutions for your own business.

3. Use modern technology more adequately

The modern tech market is full of programs and even physical tools that can help simplify the workflow in a typical call center tremendously. Things like databases, smart communication devices, automated phone menus and more, can greatly improve the capability of the call center to process complex requests, and you should make it a point to use them as often as possible to ensure that your workers are always being assisted as much as the current situation allows for.

If you’re not sure what to invest in, consult an expert familiar with the field and get their input it’s even better if you have someone like that on your regular payroll if you’re serious about your call center business.

4. Physically rearrange the work space

Sometimes this can produce surprisingly good results, and it’s a solution that many call center managers ignore until too late in their work. A call center doesn’t just rely on workers sitting at their desks all day long, and sometimes people need to move around to get certain tasks resolved, especially when there is a lot of information being shared across the department on a regular basis. With that in mind, try to ensure that the physical movements necessary to do the job are kept to a minimum, and use lean charts to draw up a representation of the current layout of the space in order to figure out where problems might be developing.

5. Perform training sessions across levels

It’s important to keep all your employees up to date on the current trends in their work, and lean especially relies on the concept of training between employees in order to drive the whole organization forward. To that end, you can help by setting up some regular sessions where people will feel more confident in sharing their knowledge, and especially focus on propagating information from higher levels down to the lower ones.

Conclusion

A call center can improve its operations tremendously by relying on lean principles, and an experienced leader should recognize those opportunities and seize them as soon as possible. Once you’ve transformed the company with the help of lean methodologies, you’ll likely see a huge change in the attitude of your customers and the responses you’re getting from them.

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