Six Sigma in sight: with Six Sigma techniques, managers improve processes and quality based on hard data

HR Magazine,  March, 2004  by Linda Heuring

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DuPont examined the relative length of assignment for expatriates, while Dow, with 127 joint ventures, used Six Sigma to improve the process of seconding employees--temporarily assigning employees to work at a joint venture. Dow's Constantin says the company had been re-inventing the process each time a joint venture was formed. "Do we wake up every morning and everyone is different? Looking at the whole seconding employee process is huge," Constantin says. "How can we do this better, not wasting people's time? People like to do real work. They don't like rework."

Improving employee benefits call centers has been a successful Six Sigma project at DuPont, Ford and GE. Nelson said GE Consumer Finance's HR team doubled employee satisfaction with HR service delivery by improving the HR Assist Center, a service that employees may call or e-mail with questions about benefits, payroll and other topics.

Setting Priorities

The list of Six Sigma projects is growing as companies create a critical mass of black belts who begin managing with a Six Sigma mind-set. There are projects on fleet management, recruitment costs, lowering average hotel room rates for employees on travel, and evaluating and managing pension programs.

With so many opportunities to apply Six Sigma, how do companies decide what projects to tackle? It all goes back to the business strategy. Dow created portfolio teams on training, learning, compensation, staffing, labor relations, executive development and other topics, and human resource team members around the world suggest projects through a computerized "idea tracker," Constantin says. DuPont uses a Lotus-based computerized tracking system it calls Six Sigma Trac, Miller says. GE has automated the process as well.

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Moving from one project to the next requires a commitment of resources and, as the critical mass of black belts grows, so does a company's ability to execute projects.

Six Sigma doesn't end with improvement, however. The last element is control, something that Canfield says isn't easy.

"The challenge has been to maintain that process," he says. "Everything's very dynamic. Keeping that focus is the challenge for the organization once the process is completed: to maintain or at least not undo processes for reasons that may not be understood."

While improvements are made to the processes, Six Sigma is still all about the customer. When that customer is internal, as are most of the HR customers, Six Sigma forces a change in thinking.

"It's easy to stay in your own little world over which you have control," says Canfield. "Push the boundary out. It's no longer what's easier for HR. It's 'What does the operating unit need from HR?' Thinking in terms of customers and suppliers--it's a different way of thinking."

It's not magic, either. It takes work to move Six Sigma through an organization. Alan Larson, who worked with Motorola in the early days of Six Sigma and who now runs CI Consulting and Training in Scottsdale, Ariz., cautions companies to pay attention to lessons learned in the 1980s, when "TQM [total quality management] activities were a failure" because "90 percent of the employees in the company were disconnected from it. What's happening now is a lot of these companies are making the same mistake with Six Sigma."