SigmaPro is a leading global provider of Lean Six Sigma Training, Lean Six Sigma consulting and business improvement programmes designed to help organisations achieve breakthrough performance improvement.
At Sigma we have studied many organisations that have achieved success, and identified four organisational competences that are required to achieve a sustainable approach to business improvement. These are Strategic Thinking, Operational Excellence, Data Driven Decision Making and Continual & Breakthrough Improvement. Supported by the right kind of culture, values and leadership, an organisation can achieve sustainable improvement.
Lean Six Sigma, Prince2, Agile, Lean are all approaches to organisation improvement. They are all different, but have one thing in common. They are all structured approaches. In other words they are organised, planned in advance and have systematic ways of doing things.
If you are not involved in projects, on the face of it, it would seem easy to achieve a goal: decide what the goal is, acquire the resources needed, plan accordingly and hey presto the objective will be achieved! But a quick review of statistics on the internet indicates that you may have a harder time than you first thought. Here are just a few of the statistics available:
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So far we have looked at the difference between business based and customer based thinking, investigated the true value of a customer and determined that it is not enough to just satisfy the customer. The next question is what we do about this in improvement projects.
At Sigma we use a four step process to collect and analyse customer data. These four steps are:
Imagine you are the General Manager of a DIY store with many employees. You will be out of the country for three months and have asked your staff to e-mail you a weekly report every Monday morning. Take a moment to write down what information and metrics you would like to see in that E mail.
No doubt you will have written downs such items as sales revenue, maybe by product line, costs, overtime, profit. Possibly things such as customer complaints, refunds and stock levels.
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