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Six Sigma is perhaps the most widely publicized process improvement methodology in the world today. With its foundations at Motorola in the 1980's it found global prominence at GE in the 1990's. In the 2000's, however, it seems to be getting mixed reviews as many organisations are becoming confused by much of the hype associated with it. An article in Business Week At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity  (June 11 2007) questioning whether Six Sigma at 3M constrained innovation has attracted a huge response and an edited version recently appeared in the Australian BRW titled "The cost of profitability" (BRW July 26 - September 5 2007: pp.94-97). Any tension between innovation and Six Sigma though is difficult to evaluate when "...the term [Six Sigma] is applied so widely and divergently that it is hard to pin down what it means." Indeed, Six Sigma proponents today generally see the methodology more as a philosophy and discipline which is much evolved from its beginnings as a statistical measure of process variation.Whatever the purported intention of a Six Sigma deployment in a company, however, more often than not it tends to be about cost reduction through the reduction of variation as "...its main value to corporations is its ability to save time and money." As a result Six Sigma tends to be adopted by companies that are focused on costs of existing processes and seeking "sameness" more than "creativity". So Six Sigma may well have contributed to restrained innovation in many companies purely as a self-fulfilling prophecy of the company drivers (cost reduction and operational efficiency vs. growth and innovation) and culture at the time of its adoption. These are company-specific traits that are often overlooked in what I see as largely standard 'vanilla' deployments of Six Sigma. It seems to me that what is required is for companies to be innovative in their deployment of Six Sigma based on what they want from it - innovation or otherwise. For a summary of my views related to how Six Sigma relates to BPM see: BPM & PI: Business Performance Partners (part 1) BPM & PI: Business Performance Partners (part 2) BPM & PI: Business Performance Partners (part 3) For further perspectives on Innovation and Business Process Management see: Innovation and BPM Customer Value: The Business Discipline of BPM For insight into the importance of culture on process outcomes see: BPM & Culture |
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