Six Sigma for Growth: Driving Profitable Top‐Line Results

Citation

Narasimhan, K. (2007), "Six Sigma for Growth: Driving Profitable Top‐Line Results", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 84-85. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2007.11.2.84.2

Edward Abramowich specializes in applying Six Sigma (SS) methods to drive top line growth and has worked with a number of companies including Allied Signal, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric. He has over ten years of experience driving major strategic change and profit improvements through SS and Lean Enterprise and currently has global responsibility for Six Sigma in the sales force at Sun Microsystems. His website contains useful case studies and examples of best practices (www.sixsigmagrowth.com).

Six Sigma (SS) management initiative has become a popular and successful method for focussing on customers and improving quality not only in manufacturing industries such as Motorola (where it originated) but also in service industries such as banks, airlines, and government agencies. This book presents an approach for using SS to drive business growth by focussing on effectiveness in addition to process efficiency. It comprises seven chapters grouped into two parts and an Appendix that contains an SS Readiness Assessment instrument. The Introduction to the book gives a brief overview of all the chapters.

The theme of Part One is “The New Focus on Growth” and it is covered in three chapters. In chapter 1, Abramowich discusses how many leading companies are using SS as a means to drive growth and how it has been applied to customer‐facing functions such as sales, marketing, service, and supply channel management. Chapter 2 is devoted to giving an appreciation of SS fundamentals and also describing new SS tools such as Lean, Design for SS, and Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM). Chapter 3 contains an outline of SS for Growth approach, which is a combination of the traditional DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control and Replicate) and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Validate and Replicate) processes and the added stage of the Discovery Phase that is covered in depth in the following chapter.

The “Growth Tool Set” is the theme of Part Two and is covered in four chapters. The three steps (Searching for, and assessing those, opportunities, and then targeting a select few) of the Discovery Phase of the Growth Plan are explained in chapter 4. Chapter 5 deals with a Breakthrough Approach to Growth using the Discovery phase along with the tradition DMAIC approach to add value to customers while making profits for an organization. Dr Noriaki Kano's concepts of customer satisfaction, delight, and dissatisfaction, and market segmentation are also briefly covered. A detailed overview of using the Discovery Phase with the DMADV steps, to increase growth through new offerings and solutions, is given in chapter 6. The final chapter (comparatively a long one – 68 pages) details some of the SS for Growth tool set. The tools covered 12 focus areas of: Market Indicator Analysis; Project Charter and Growth Plan; Risk Analysis using FMEA (Failure, Mode, and Effects Analysis); Stakeholder Analysis; QFD (Quality Functional Deployment); conjoint analysis; and Mapping Customer Core and Peripheral Activities.

The text is well supported by 70 exhibits and is a useful addition to the new books on extending Six Sigma.