Apply the powerful technique of Six Sigma to your business!

When Six Sigma pioneer Greg Brue developed the first large-scale Six Sigma program at General Electric Co., it changed the face of business by decreasing wasted costs, improving performance and increasing profit.

Now, for the first time ever, that powerful process can be applied to your small business.

This valuable guide:

• Simplifies the terminology and methodology of Six Sigma to make the process accessible and applicable to any small business
• Teaches the basics of Six Sigma and walks you through a step-by-step implementation
• Helps you improve quality and efficiency, increase customer satisfaction and boost profits
• Shows you how Six Sigma uncovers hidden sources of money
• Provides real-life examples of small businesses’ successes with Six Sigma

With Six Sigma, your business will gain profitability immediately. This guide will change the way you do business forever!

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PDF format, 989KB, 224Pages.

Paperback: 320 pages
Author: Greg Brue, Six Sigma Consultants, Inc
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1932531556
ISBN-13: 978-1932531558

ABOUT THIS BOOK
  One of my goals is to engage you and keep you interested as you proceed through the book. To that end, nearly every chapter starts off with a story of some small business and how Six Sigma could have helped or did help that business to grow and become more profitable. So look for those and consider how they might relate to your operations.

Chapter 1 gives you a basic overview of what this Six Sigma stuff is all about and why it’s become so well accepted in thousands of businesses in the U.S. and around the world. It will get you thinking about some areas where you might undertake Six Sigma improvement projects.

Chapter 2 talks about quality and its place in management. You’ll read about how intiating Six Sigma will affect your employees and what your role is in all this. I touch briefly on Six Sigma and company culture, but I want to emphasize here as well that developing a culture that supports your Six Sigma efforts is vital to your success. So keep that in mind as you read and decide how to use Six Sigma in your business.

To be able to improve something, you have to know how to measure it. Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of some useful business metrics and how to use them to your advantage. Metrics help you understand what’s going right and where you can make improvements. I also introduce some basic—very basic—statistics in this chapter, which are vital to creating and interpreting the metrics that will be most useful to you in identifying improvement projects and measuring your results.

Chapter 4 is all about the people who will be involved in your Six Sigma initiative. Over time, especially influenced by GE’s approach, different roles have emerged—Champions, Black Belts, Green Belts, Project Team Members—and the people who take on these roles are responsible for executing Six Sigma projects in your company. This chapter gives you a clear description of these roles so you think about which of your people would be best suited to them.

Picking an improvement project on which to unleash the power of Six Sigma is an important consideration, and this is what you’ll learn about in Chapter 5. Here you’ll read about key criteria for selecting a project with the most payoff. You’ll also learn what bad projects are and how to avoid selecting those. You’ll learn about a tool, Pareto charts, that will help you drill down into a problem to identify which factors are the most important in terms of costs vs. benefits.

The Six Sigma methodology is structured into five phases—Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC). Chapters 6-10, one chapter at a time, take you through each of these steps and how to apply them to small business problems. This five-step process is logical and, in fact, even intuitive. All Six Sigma does is apply it with discipline and tools that allow you and your employees to systematically maximize results.

Chapter 6 explains the Define phase. Here you’ll learn about how to define your problem in a way that allows everyone to clearly understand it in terms of why it was chosen and what the potential savings will be from finding its causes and eliminating them.

The second phase in the Six Sigma process is Measure, and that’s the topic of Chapter 7. You’ve defined the problem, now you have to measure, using metrics discussed in Chapter 3 and different tools, how the inputs into your processes are causing outcomes that keep your business from being more effective. In other words, you establish relationships between what you do and what’s going wrong.

Once you’ve established those relationships, you’re ready for the Analyze phase, the subject of Chapter 8. Here you learn how to develop a hypothesis about which inputs are most closely related to the problems you’re experiencing so you can make changes that will result in the improvements you seek.

Now we reach what some might call the action step: the Improve phase, covered in Chapter 9. Here’s where you test your hypothesis and see if the changes you’re considering will actually work. The Improve phase helps you establish real correlations between inputs and outputs and create experiments that will determine which changes will give you the results you’re looking for—results that make it all worthwhile. This chapter is a bit more demanding some of the others, but that’s the nature of this methodology. It’s logical and scientific, but it also requires that, through experiments, you make the right changes. So keep that in mind as you work through this chapter.

Finally, you’ve made the changes and gotten the gains you hoped for. The final step in the process is the Control phase, Chapter 10. This is where you ensure that the changes you’ve made will be sustained, with even more improvements possible. In this chapter you’ll get introduced to control charts and how to use them to keep your processes working well and to quickly deal with issues that may arise.

So that’s it—Six Sigma for your small business. There is a final chapter, however. Chapter 11 is a brief one on taking stock of what you’ve learned and how you can begin implementing Six Sigma in your business. If your company is large enough to use a Six Sigma consultant, I give you some advice on choosing one who will meet your needs. I also include case studies that show how DMAIC worked in three companies to get outstanding results.

There you have it. Thanks for choosing this book—and good luck as you embark on your Six Sigma journey!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Brue is the world's leading practitioner of six sigma. He worked with CEO Jack Welch to implement six sigma at General Electric, and his success model and training content have been the industry standard for more than a decade.

As CEO of six sigma Consultants, Inc., he trains and mentors executives and conducts six sigma seminars and monthly boot camps. His clients have included Citibank,Target, DuPont, Raytheon, and Verizon.

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