Question

The January 22, 2001, issue of Fortune contained an article “Why You Can Safely Ignore Six Sigma,” that was highly critical of Six Sigma. Here are some of the criticisms levied against Six Sigma:

How would you respond to these statements?

a. The results often don’t have any noticeable impact on company financial statements. Thus, Six Sigma success doesn’t correlate to higher stock value. This criticism applies to 90 percent of the companies that implement Six Sigma.

b. Only early adopters can benefit.

c. Six Sigma focuses on defects, which are hard to objectively determine for service businesses.

d. Six Sigma can’t guarantee that your product will have a market.

Answer 1

1. This is not a true statement. Sigma six focuses on the negative value a process or an entity provides to the system as a whole and therefore, the system process efficiency is increased this, in turn, increases the throughput and essentially increases the stock value.

2. This is not a true statement as the adoption of sigma six can benefit any organization, at any level at any point in time and not just early adopters. This does not depend on the time of adoption.

3. This is a true statement. Unlike manufacturing industry, the service industry has little definable process quantity when we consider for the six sigma model to be computed effectively.

4. This is a true statement because six sigma can only make the process of creation of the product better, not predict how it will be received in the market.