Six sigma is a quality improvement framework that has gained considerable popularity. Its extension Lean Six Sigma has been embraced by many organisations for improvement of quality and business competitiveness. One important factor for the popularity of six sigma and lean six sigma is their potential for improving service systems, in contrast to the conventional perceptions that only manufacturing systems can benefit from the statistics based methodologies.
Understanding the Principle
Understanding the principles of six sigma can prove to make life very difficult for everyone involved, no matter how serious or trivial the matter may seen at first. Instead of explaining that six sigma offers data analysis and measurement that can lead to better solutions for various industries, you should figure out exactly how that concept could or would work in a specific industry.
For the sake of a practical example, consider a store checkout scenario. A store has ten cash registers, and only about five or six of them are open at any given time. It is wasteful to employ more people to open more registers in the situation, but customers are waiting between 5 and 10 minutes to checkout, which creates a decreased sense of satisfaction. The sales aren’t high enough to warrant opening more registers, but a process needs to be devised in order to increase the flow of customers and make people more satisfied with their transactions.
The tools
Six Sigma Tools can be used to map out a process that will streamline the checkout process and figure out where things are going wrong. Maybe you have customers with too many items all standing in the same line, or perhaps you have a cashier that is operating slowly. Perhaps it’s even the bagging process that takes longer because the cashier has to do it all. It might even be a slow and older computer system that you haven’t been able to afford to update. No matter what the issues are, Six Sigma Projects can help to find the issues, figure out where, why, and how they are happening, and help come up with an effective solution to fix them. After a successful Six Sigma Process, your wait times might go town to 4-7 minutes, which isn’t much of an improvement but it is a start.
Conclusion
With that, you can put a continuous improvement plan into place and work to keep decreasing that wait time until you have cut costs, added more to your bottom line, and increased customer satisfaction to a point where you can afford to keep making improvements and growing in your success. There are many other applications of Six Sigma Certification in retail sales, but this is just one example that you can consider.
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