Advanced Six Sigma in Small Business

Six Sigma is a business management strategy that can be effectively used in many ways by small businesses to improve the overall quality of business operations to achieve faster growth.

For people who may be less familiar, Six Sigma may be simplistically defined as a form of business management strategy, or more appropriately, a type of business improvement methodology. This methodology was first successfully tried by Motorola during the penultimate decade of the previous century and today has become immensely popular and finds widespread application across many types of industries – not excluding small businesses. Six Sigma Methodology for Small Businesses

Six Sigma attempts to identify all areas of inefficiency and removes all possible causes of failures aimed at improving the overall quality of business operations. Apart from introducing a set of quality control methods, Sigma goes beyond to develop a special team of people within the organization, branded as Black Belts - who are trained to become experts in these methods.

Several well-established organizations including Dupont, Federal Express, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Kodak, Sony and Toshiba have implemented Six Sigma steps and achieved remarkable progress within a short span of time.

Although there is a popular misconception that Six Sigma is meant only for major corporate houses, many management professionals opine that on the contrary, it is much easier for small businesses to introduce and successfully implement Six Sigma than larger corporations. Experts further suggest that the basic Six Sigma principles called Six Sigma MAIC (measure, analyze, improve, and control) has no relevance to the size of the business or the number of employees working.

Of course, it has to be conceded that there are a few limiting factors when implementing Six Sigma in small business houses - like resource constraints and lack of capable manpower. But as a compensating advantage, small businesses enjoy flexible process flows, less procedural delays, no cumbersome decision-making chain and transparency of senior management.

Small businesses generally can ill-afford to permanently have full-time Master Black Belts on payroll or hire people with the skills and expertise to step into the role of Black Belts without extensive training. As a start, small businesses can avail the services of a certified Six Sigma consultant to act as the company’s Black Belt till the business expands to generate adequate revenue for training its own staff.

An experienced Black Belt consultant coming from outside will straightaway provide a head-start by immediately implementing Six Sigma. The heartening fact is the financial savings realized after introducing Six Sigma will amply pay for the entire cost of the Six Sigma training.

After initially training some employees of the small business as Green Belts, Six Sigma projects can proceed unhindered with Green Belts executing the Six Sigma processes. Gradually these Green Belts may be trained into Black Belts by the external Black Belt consultant. This type of slow training approach will help many smaller companies to implement Six Sigma at a pace it can more comfortably manage. Small business owners can also draw comfort from the fact that because of the size of a small business, the benefits of Six Sigma will be realized faster.

As a concluding comment, it may be stated that the term "Six Sigma" is a trademark registered and owned by Motorola and Motorola, proudly proclaims that Six Sigma has helped the company saving billions of dollars.

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