Introduced in 1986, Six Sigma has prompted a revolution in how business dealt with quality control and project implementation. Six Sigma is a path-breaking methodology which helps a business to reach the zenith of success. But like everything, this approach has also some upsides and downsides which you should evaluate before implementing this method.
Advantages of Six Sigma
- Proven success: A plethora of statistics has claimed that Six Sigma can uplift a company’s sales volume, stock value, and employee growth if it has been implemented the method properly. An eminent company like GE enjoyed $8 billion in savings during the first three years because it has adopted and used the Six Sigma program wisely.
- Improves customer satisfaction: Six Sigma is driven by the customer and thus, it helps a company to achieve maximum customer satisfaction by minimizing the errors. It targets the customer delight and provides the company with the innovative ways so that it can meet the requirements of the customers.
- Enhance the profit: By implementing Six Sigma methodology, you can uplift your profit and at the same time can reduce the costs. Thus, improvements achieved are directly related to financial results.
- Prevents the errors: It is true that Sigma is a prospective methodology as compared to other quality programs. So, the primary focus of Six Sigma is to prevent the defects rather than fixing it.
- Improves entire business process: It is attentive to the entire business processes and training is integral to the management system where the top-down approach ensures that every good thing is capitalized and every bad thing is quickly removed.
Now, take a look at some of the weaknesses of Six Sigma approach.
Downsides of Six Sigma
- Prevents innovation: Six Sigma gives priority on the rigidity of the process which basically gainsays the innovation, kills and the creativity. The innovative approach implies deviations in production, the redundancy, the unusual solutions, insufficient study which are opposite to Six Sigma principles.
- Expensive: If you are planning to implement Six Sigma approach to your company, then you need to spend a humongous amount. Because you need to provide training to your employees specially related to Six Sigma methods. This training is quite expensive and will burn your pocket.
- Complicated: Six Sigma model requires a significant amount of statistical data gathering and analysis. The process is intricate and time-consuming. That’s why smaller businesses are not very much inclined to this approach because they find it is very complicated to sustain for long periods of time and give up on six sigma as a potential business model for their company.
- Total participation is required: If you want to employ Six Sigma, then the total cooperation of the company is needed. If the entire company is not on board, success is not likely. In large companies, getting the entire staff on the same page can be a difficult process.
These are some strengths and weaknesses of Six Sigma which you should know before implementing this approach for your organization.