"...

Six Sigma este un proces de nalta disciplina care ne ajuta sa dezvoltam si sa livram
produse si servicii aproape de perfectiune. De ce Sigma? Cuvntul reprezinta un termen
statistic care masoara ct de mult un proces se ndeparteaza de perfectiune. Ideea centrala n
spatele Six Sigma este ca, daca poti masura cte defecte ai intr-un proces, poti n mod
sistematic sa realizezi cum sa le elimini si sa ajungi ct se poate de aproape de zero defecte.
Pentru a ajunge la calitatea Six Sigma, un proces nu trebuie sa produca mai mult de 3,4 defecte la
un milion de oportunitati. O oportunitate este definita ca sansa de a se produce o
neconformitate sau de a nu ndeplini specificatiile impuse. Aceasta nseamna ca trebuie sa fim
aproape fara greseala n executarea proceselor noastre cheie.
Six Sigma has changed the DNA of GE it is now the way we work in everything we do
and in every product we design. Six Sigma focuses first on reducing process variation and then
on improving the process capability.
"...La baza, Six Sigma graviteaza n jurul ctorva concepte cheie:
Critic pentru Calitate: Atributele cele mai importante pentru client
Defect: Esec n a livra ceea ce clientul doreste
Capabilitatea procesului: Ce poate procesul sa livreze
Variatie: Ceea ce clientul vede si simte
Operatii stabile: Asigurarea unor procese consistente si predictibile pentru a mbunatati ceea
ce clientul vede si simte
Proiectare pentru Six Sigma: Proiectare pentru a ndeplini cerintele clientului si capabilitatea
procesului..." http://www.ge.com/sixsigma/gecommitment.html
GE adopted most of its Six Sigma concepts and methodology from pioneers such as Motorola.
Six Sigma implementation at General Electric started with a heavy emphasis on training the
workforce for data-based problem analysis. GE required all exempt employees to undertake a 13day, 100 hour training program in Six Sigma methodologies and complete a Six Sigma project
by the end of 1998.
Mentoring
The success story of Six Sigma and GE would not have been possible without GE's system of
mentoring programs.
Full-time Master Black Belts, hired specifically for implementation of Six Sigma, led the process
change. Each Master Black Belt trained and mentored key process employees for the Black Belt
level. Employees selected for Black Belt underwent four-month training and applied Six Sigma
tools at work under the guidance of the Master Black Belt mentor. GE soon deployed full
time Black Belt teams to implement Six Sigma projects throughout GE.
Part time project leaders or employees who received Six Sigma training that were placed on Six
Sigma projects only became Green Belts.
Leadership
General Electrics experience in the implementation of Six Sigma shows that the best of training
and mentoring efforts would crumble without effective leadership. Jack Welch, GEs CEO
supported the Six Sigma initiative not just with the necessary financial resources, but also

through securing vital commitment from both the senior executives and the workforce. Welch
linked promotion and bonus to quality improvement. Forty percent of each top management
bonus depended on the successful implementation of Six Sigma goals and a Green Belt became
the minimum requirement for the promotion of any employee.
Jack Welch and other top management, most notably Dave Cote, President, and CEO of GE
Appliances followed a hands-on approach to Six Sigma and led from the front through the
following methods:

Spending time in Six Sigma Training sessions and personally answering questions for
employees undergoing training
Surprised visits to Six Sigma review sessions
Work-floor visits to make first hand observations on the extent of Six Sigma implementation
at the workplace
Weekly summary reports and monthly reviews with the Master Black Belt team.

Focused Implementation
One major reason for the success story of Six Sigma and GE is the focused approach toward
implementation.
GE's three time-tested implementation approaches are "Show Me the Money," "Everybody
Plays," and "Specific Techniques."

Show Me the Money - GE approaches Six Sigma with a focus on the bottom-line. The need
to cut costs in a competitive price-sensitive marketplace made GE apply Six Sigma to
remove workplace defects and improve productivity, besides improving product quality.
Everybody Plays - Much of GEs product lines are comprised of many outsourced parts.
GE understood the need for the supplier to participate in the Six Sigma initiative to make the
product fully Six Sigma compliant and invested in bringing the suppliers to Six Sigma.
Specific Techniques - GE cultivated the art of ranking projects and aligning them to the
business goals through Six Sigma tools such as the process map.

Conclusion
Application of Six Sigma at General Electric brought a marked culture change in the attitude of
individual employees toward quality, translating into dramatically lower service-call rates, and
improved product reliability. The Six Sigma effort at GE contributed $700 million in corporate
benefits in 1997, just two years into the program.
From a small beginning to improving product quality by reducing defects at the workplace, the
scope of Six Sigma at GE has expanded over the years, and today Six Sigmas customer focused,
data driven philosophy defines how GE works.
http://www.brighthubpm.com/change-management/69148-the-story-of-six-sigma-and-ge/

Six Sigma: Why GE do it

Steve Sargent, President and CEO, Australia and New Zealand, GE Commercial Finance
Six Sigma originated as a way of improving manufacturing quality by reducing defects through
traditional quality disciplines of statistical process control, root cause analysis and activity
measurement.
What initially appealed to GE about Six Sigma?
Why did Six Sigma appeal? It's very measurement driven, and GE is certainly a measurementdriven culture. It was something that we have always had, so Six Sigma was leveraging one of
our key execution competencies. Another appeal was that Six Sigma is prefaced upon what the
customer wants. We call it CTQ (Critical to Quality), understanding what customers want in a
measurable way. Basically the leadership team felt they needed something that was going to
further enhance our already measurement-driven, execution-focused culture and would help us
become even more customer-focused.
You're on record as saying GE uses Six Sigma for improving business performance, not
simply process improvement. Do you want to expand on that?
SS: If you look at the companies who had done a good job of implementing Six Sigma up until
then, such as Allied Signal and Motorola, they had universally focused on manufacturing
processes. They were all focused on getting less defects in their current production environment.
They had a lot of statisticians sitting there, working on their process improvement projects in the
manufacturing department. It wasn't a part of the general management culture. It wasn't a part of
the energy of the business. They might have had excellent manufacturing processes, with very
few defects, but they weren't looking at areas such as their delivery process or their revenue
generating activities with the same rigour.
What about the beginning? Was it difficult to take people out of running the business and
put them into Six Sigma projects? Many might have seen it as a demotion, after all!
SS: It was just forced through. Welch said to people "I'm going to pull rank here, regardless of
how well you are performing in your current role, you are going to do this." Personally, when I
got thrown in to a Six Sigma Assignment, my initial response was "What have I done wrong?"
The first six months was tough. But then what happens is the lights go on one day and you think,
now I understand why this is so powerful. That was the way it had to be, it had to be led from the
top, and you had to do what looked like irrational things. But the rewards were also there. People
who have been put into Six Sigma were rewarded with bigger jobs, they got more stock options.
There were very clear signals being sent, and I think all of this made sure Six Sigma really
permeated every part of the company.

Were people initially sceptical about Six Sigma? You often here people say all that
statistical process analysis is more applicable to manufacturing than services, for instance.
SS: I think the understanding developed that everything we do is a process, and just because
you're not manufacturing a physical item, it doesn't mean you can't effectively apply process
thinking. If you take the Commercial Finance business in the US, which was the first business I
was the Six Sigma Leader in, we were doing a couple of hundred deals a year with an average
size of US $50Million. So it wasn't a real high-volume process shop, and, let me tell you, people
there had a real tough time of understanding how does this Six Sigma stuff apply to us!
I think the key to getting them on board was creating what we called the "deal factory";
that is the process we go through from finding prospects through to issuing proposals, getting the
deal approved and documenting the deal. How can I make this factory more efficient? Well,
while I only may have 200 items in here, can I calculate an effective Sigma on that? Not really,
because I only need one defect and I've got a poor Sigma measurement. However, I do know a
lot about each individual prospect as it progresses through the process, so I can look at the
factors that determine whether I am successful or not at each stage in the process. I can work on
the things that help us win, and eliminate the things that make us lose, and I can make the whole
process much more efficient.
You then start looking at causal factors for each stage in the process. How many calls are
your sales guys going on? Are they speaking to the right number of people? Are they speaking to
the right people? Before we applied this to our business in September 1996, our success rate for
prospects was 28% 72% of the time we failed! We were growing at the rate of 30%, but still
failing 72% of the time. By the end of 1997, after we applied Six Sigma, the comparable win rate
was 63% - simply by working on our processes. This meant our sales people would win two out
of every three deals they were bidding onincredibly impactful stuff!
How did you get those people in the business who were initially sceptical on board?
Communication is a key, particularly in these less obvious applications of Six Sigma. If you start
talk about statistics and sigmas, people's eyes glaze over, and you just can't connect. You have to
use a language they understand, and focus on giving people reasons to change their behavior. If
you combine your cost data with your process data, you can get the sort of information that
changes behavior. I could say things like, "Listen, every time you issue a proposal, and you don't
get it approved, that costs us $670,000." Now did they know that before? No. Did that change
their behaviour? You bet. It made us really focus on more effective screening of our prospective
deals better up front so that we didn't waste resources down the track.
But how do you identify the causal factors in making a process work better? Surely in
many cases it's not obvious?
SS: You're right, and what's even more interesting, even when you think you know, you don't!
You find the root cause is often something else. All too often in business, business improvement
decisions are made on the basis of anecdotal evidence and hearsay, we often don't have enough
data, and we tend to come up with a solution that doesn't work because we haven't understood

the problem. In all my years of leading businesses, I estimate that more than 50% of the time the
thing that you initially thought was the problem is ultimately a 'hidden' cause.
That's the beauty of Six Sigma: it takes a business problem, converts it to a statistical problem,
collects the data, and tests hypotheses about what caused your problem, and whether what you
are proposing will really fix it. Both of these can be proven statistically.
So why is Six Sigma so important to GE?
SS: Six Sigma at GE is about leadership development, driving change, and having a
measurement driven culture which leads to execution. We want to drive human behaviours to
generate action which results in net income, and to do that you need to give people a clear
measure and let them know how they are performing against it, and to reward or penalize based
on the result. At GE we typically identify three or four key imperatives that we are going to drive
the hell out of for the year, such as sales force excellence, or pricing, or cash flow and we use Six
Sigma to do this. It gives us a rigor we need in a business the size of ours - you can't manage
large businesses purely by intuition.
Six Sigma also provides a common approach across all our different businesses. Our businesses
range from aircraft engines through to finance, plastics - you name it, we're in it! With such an
incredible diversity of businesses, how do you go from one to the other and try to get a common
language and culture? Six Sigma has become one of the key drivers of creating synergies
between them.
On a personal level, I think it's simply the best way to run a business. If GE ever came out and
said we're not doing this anymore - well I'd still keep doing it!. I simply don't know of anything
else that is as effective in running a business.
Often the key principles of Six Sigma, like measurement-driven change, are more important than
some of the formalism. Measurement is the key. If you are a smaller company, and you don't feel
you need to go into all this Six Sigma stuff, if you do nothing else but measure key aspects of
your business, you will be a better business tomorrow, and it is not that hard to do. If you
concentrate on the predictive metrics and on activity based metrics that drive behaviour, rather
than the traditional financial metrics that simply tell you what happened when it's too late to do
anything about it , you will get real benefits.and you will be amazed at how quickly these
benefits are realized.
Another key is thinking end-to-end process, and from the customer perspective. In a lot of
companies, what I call the wiring is put together wrong - people are working hard in their
individual functions and activities, but things aren't put together right from a process point of
view. Six Sigma gives you a great toolset for improving business performance by solving these
types of business problems.
http://www.ceoforum.com.au/article-detail.cfm?cid=6050&t=/Steve-Sargent-GE-Australia-New-Zealand/Six-Sigma-Why-GE-do-it