Deploying Your Six Sigma Team

So you’ve got your Six Sigma team ready for deployment: How will you do it? What do you need to do to make sure that your team will become effective? Where must they be placed?

Before being able to deploy your team, first you have to make a thorough study as to which area within the company you need the Six Sigma process the most. Normally, the Six Sigma experts are often positioned as the quality control group. They will be the one to make sure that a smooth, working process that creates only the best products will be followed during the manufacturing.

The first step in your study should be collecting all sorts of comprehensive data directly from your observation process. This comprises of information from experiments, focus groups, personal interviews and surveys. It should be followed up by a secondary study where information from indirect sources, such as formerly published studies and surveys should be gathered as well. The team then now collates all the information in hand and uses it in the Six Sigma deployment process. By doing this, it will be easier to highlight some of the more obvious problems which should be eliminated quickly while the changes are taking place. In a much simpler way, the problematic patterns can be revealed sooner, thus the replacement and process transitions goes smoothly during the entire development phase.

By doing a brief study of the industry’s history, background on its benchmarks, emphasizing on the cost of poor quality, while you quantify on the savings, it will illustrate the possibilities of gaining control of the process when the Six Sigma team had been deployed. During the studies, include in process value procedures that would reduce rejects, errors in documents, defects in design, software troubles, inventory backlogs, overproduction, over processing, under utilization of workers, and time wasting. Keep in mind that having a better utilization of people is one of the significant elements of a Six Sigma deployment.

To top a successful Six Sigma deployment, all you have to do is to use soft skills. Soft skills are those you consider as the listening skills, hands on coaching and training if required, an impulse control on finding solutions for troubles, and an ability to remain cool even when under pressure, shows constant enthusiasm and energy, and a positive outlook all the time. Other useful soft skills that could also be considered, especially during the Six Sigma deployment and application is the capacity to sustain the changes made along the enhancements. To be able to manage resistance to the change in cultures and being able to duplicate its success when you’ve found the right formula is a good point as well.

When you’ve considered all these, and be able to maintain your standing, then continuous success is expected. By constantly evaluating your work, say regularly, you’ll be able to regularly update your products including being able to lessen anymore defect it could face. You’ll not only be giving your consumers the best quality product you can possibly make, you’ll be giving them customer satisfaction as well.