Nothing puts a chill into system devotees more than the idea that the scheme they rely on, whether it be Total Quality Management, lean or their FranklinCovey Planner, is not "the answer." That's been the case in some quarters for Six Sigma, the celebrated methodology developed at Motorola in 1986 and championed most famously by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch as a way to improve productivity and cut costs by identifying and eliminating defects in manufacturing processes and other business areas.

During the late 1990s, Six Sigma -- a quality improvement process based on producing fewer than 3.4 defects per million -- was credited for astounding results in improving quality and reducing costs. At General Electric alone, thousands of projects were estimated to have added $5 billion to the firm's net earnings over its first five years of implementation. To date, Motorola pegs the financial benefits of Six Sigma at more than $17 billion.

But is Six Sigma's reign as the answer to company productivity improvement coming to a close? Headlines such as "Why Six Sigma is on the Downslope" and "Six Sigma: So Yesterday" seem to support that impression. In a recent study, executive recruiting firm The Avery Point Group found that calls for managers with lean knowledge exceeded that for Six Sigma talent by almost 11%, reflecting what Tim Noble, the company's managing principal, called "an indication that they see lean as a better and more practical hedge against today's tough economic challenges."

Some observers say the seeds of Six Sigma's perceived shortcomings come not from problems with the methodology itself, but how it is applied and the high expectations it has engendered in the manufacturing world.

"To an extent, Six Sigma is kind of a religion," notes George Haley, a business professor at the University of New Haven and director of the Center for International Industry Competitiveness. "When it focuses on the manufacturing process, it is very good. If you want to improve efficiency, cut down on failure rate and errors, that is Six Sigma's strength."

But Six Sigma is often applied too late, Haley observes, so that products are designed in a way that invites problems on the production floor. Product design engineers have "360-degree access" to a product in the R&D lab, but workers on the line who have to attach components and perform other tasks don't have that same access and sometimes can't see what is going on. The problem may be exacerbated by robotics, he notes.

Haley also criticizes the application of Six Sigma to services such as health care. For example, a nurse may be given a specific amount of time to perform a patient service. But Haley notes that patients differ and that nurses may need to perform a different service than initially expected. "If the nurse doesn't have time to figure out what they need, patients can get a lot of wrong treatment," he warns. "Six Sigma should stay out of hospitals and stay out of any business where you have human-to-human interaction. Humans just aren't programmable; they aren't machines."

Lean Six Sigma at Xerox

Last year, Xerox Corp. executives went through a Six Sigma exercise they gladly would have avoided. The company used Six Sigma to help organize a far-reaching restructuring that cut approximately 3,000 jobs and trimmed $200 million in costs. Employing the methodology helped Xerox be "thoughtful" about how it made the cuts and prevent harm to its operations, says Doug Burgess, Xerox's senior vice president of corporate lean Six Sigma.

View article on one page