When The ROI Alliance implements Six Sigma, we do it in a fully integrated way that we call Business Performance Excellence or BPE. Our objective is to maximize your profit, and to do that you must optimize the entire business. When Six Sigma practitioners lack what Deming called "profound knowledge" about business, there is a risk of an implementation that will be a financial disaster.
Some warning signs:
- By focusing solely on the "sigma" index (a measure of conformance to specifications) you can drive your business into the ground. First, because people have been known to manipulate the calculations in order to achieve the goal of "six sigma" and second, because there is a lot more to a business than product conformance to specification. A holographic set of business measures is needed to avoid this, and these are generated in the early phases of BPE.
- A small cadre of highly-trained business improvement specialists, like Black Belts, can make a significant impact by solving very important problems - but they have to be given the right problems to solve. This implies that the business strategy has been correctly translated into Six Sigma projects. The strategic plan is not the starting point - it is the logical result that emerges from the BPE process.
- While you want those few highly-trained problem-solvers out there solving big-ticket problems, you also need a structure for the other 95% of the company to make continuous improvements in their own process. In BPE, this structure is known as "daily management."
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