In this chapter, we will determine what brings value to an organization applying Six Sigma. To get started, let’s first consider customer satisfaction. Focusing on the voice of the customer to drive change and improvement in the organization is absolutely critical. And this is where Six Sigma tools to analyze data can be very helpful to understand what customers care about. Six Sigma gives us tools to address the inputs through future strategic planning, by addressing marketing effectiveness. How to get things right the first time, and what is it the customers are really interested in with respect to our products and services. A fantastic tool kit in the Six Sigma bag is called Kano. Kano is a way of gathering data from customers and beginning to understand what’s important to them that really differentiates us. What are the things that we can do more of that add more satisfaction? And what are the things that they are neutral about, or could be dissatisfiers in that product or service that we provide? If we move on now and think about strategic planning, Six Sigma analytics can help us determine the customer satisfaction factors and use these as key inputs to the strategic planning process. We can use Six Sigma to understand key financial drivers within the operations of the organization, and where we need to focus our improvements.
There are very powerful tools around product and service development that can help us get to market much faster. We want to rigorously examine features and functions that we plan for future products. And then we determine which of those are particularly important to the customer. Then we determine how we’re going to incorporate those at the correct level of quality and speed to earn the market share that we really deserve. From an organizational culture perspective, using the rigor of Six Sigma for chartering, developing metrics controls, and engaging quality circle teams can really drive an organization forward. Profitability is always important, and we need to continue to reduce costs. Six Sigma is very helpful in accomplishing that. Reducing costs of quality is an important aspect in bringing down costs as well. Because organizations could be spending as much as 20% to 75% of the cost of sales in just assuring quality in products and services. With increased market share, we continue to work towards shorter product development cycles, being tightly aligned to the customer’s needs, and doing everything better and faster than our competitors.