Six Sigma Journey: Quality was never such fun

Six Sigma Journey: Quality was never such fun

 I just completed my Six Sigma Black Belt process improvement project. And contrary to the generic perception of Quality, it’s a lot of fun. 

Interested to know more. Read on...

 Jack Welch once said: “The big myth is that Six Sigma is about quality control and statistics. It is that—but it’s a helluva lot more. At Six Sigma’s core is an idea that can turn a company inside out, focusing the organization outward on the customer.”

The journey started like in May, 3 years ago when we had the 2^nd batch of Six Sigma training. The training highly instigated my engineering genes as we as engineers have a natural inclination for Statistics. The next step was selection of a project for process improvement. It was surprising to find that so many of processes were not yet base lined (i.e. we do not know the average time taken for the activities).  So I selected 2 processes that were a pain-point for Production Readiness (PR) Items and Cross-Release Merge Items.

What followed after, was the DMAIC rigor of Six Sigma which led to Statistical Analysis, Process Analysis, Brain storming and Solution implementation. DMAIC are 5 steps of Six Sigma being Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control.

Six Sigma Project #1:  Production Readiness (PR) Items:

The handling time of PR items was large at ~25 days and was not base lined at all. The delay in handling Production Readiness Items added additional risk to the Release deployment. He established the handling time bench-mark as Median at 23.806 days. The target now was to reduce this time by 10%.

The DMAIC efforts crystallized together and the rigor worked as it should leading to timeline gains. The outcome was the reduction in handling time of PR Items by 4.77 days i.e. 20.03 %( target was 10%). Also was defined the Control plan to sustain and exceed this reduction in PR items time. Reduction in PR Items turn-around time meant that we had better UAT testing of those items and lesser risk to production.

Six Sigma Project #2:  Cross-Release Merge Items:

            The original % of Cross-Release Merge items outside 7 days target of Turn-around time was 22.4% which poses potential risk to production and therefore needs to be reduced. The goal is to reduce % of Cross-Release Merge items outside 7 days TAT from 22.4% to 15% by April 2013.

          The DMAIC efforts  led to Reduce in % of Cross-Release Merge items outside 7 days TAT  from 22.4% to 9.3% (Exceeded target by 24%) leading to Saving of 1.14 MM/year.  Reduce in Cross-Release Merge items due to Versync CR - Saving of 2.42 MM/year and Total Ongoing Savings for Account of 4.60 MM/year

 

I urge people to go for the Six Sigma project, as not only is it a professionally enriching experience; it’s a lot of fun too J