6 sigma customer focus

The walls of one of the ground-floor conference rooms at GE Capital's Gurgaon office and almost every hardboard at the neighbouring GEcis centre are festooned with laser prints of graphs and dials that look surprisingly like an automobile's dashboard. These are customer dashboards-there's one for every major customer-which indicate customer CTQs, and process dashboards, which measure how close, or far, the process is from meeting them. Your processes could be 6s and the customer could never know it. At the very core of each of GE's 6s initiatives are customer CTQs. Pramod Bhasin, the 47-year-old CEO of GE Capital, is partial to a metaphor that originated, arguably, in GE's aircraft engines business: wing to wing. The import of this metaphor? The customer isn't concerned about how fast your engine overhaul process is; what matters to him is the time that elapses between the time you take the engine off the wing for maintenance, and the time you re-install it. Avers Bhasin: ''6s is getting to be the most efficient and the fastest way of delivering service to the customer.'' Seconds Pradeep Bhargava, 51, the CEO of the Bangalore-based GE Lighting: ''Six Sigma can make a significant difference to the 3 things that are important to the customer: quality, cost, and delivery.'' Last word: 6s @ GE works better because it is focused on improving business processes to deliver better customer-service.

6 sigma leadership

Leading a 6s organisation like GE is based on a simple premise: 6s is an enabling initiative. Explains Bayman: ''When we adopted Six Sigma, one of the things we decided was that it would not be a quality initiative, but something that changed the very fabric of the company-how we worked.'' It isn't easy being the leader of an organisation that is adopting 6s. The commitment to resources it necessitates could end up shaking up the most intrepid of CEOs. GE, for instance, gets its best people to work on Black Belt projects, and finds replacements to handle their responsibilities. The company benefits in 2 ways from this: one, it manages to get its best employees involved in creating efficient processes or rendering existing ones more efficient; and two, when, at the end of 18 months, these people take up a functional role again, the company finds itself with an employee who looks at every little thing the Six Sigma way. ''We never realised it, but 6s is turning out to be a great employee development tool,'' boasts Bayman.

The most important role a leader can play in a company's 6s efforts is to create the ideal setting for it. Concurs Anil Sharma, 39, Regional Training Manager (India), General Electric International Operations: ''The leader has to create a culture of openness. You can't implement Six Sigma in an organisation where there is a culture of fear. Or where there are too many hierarchies.'' Last word: 6s@GE works better because the company uses the ideal leadership techniques.

Integral to the 6s practices at GE's businesses are 6s support tools. Six Sigma is a statistics heavy technique, but the use of software-enabled tools like Minitab-a package that performs complex statistical tests on raw data fed in by the user-makes things easy. All the Black Belt (or the Green Belt) working on a project needs to know is when to use what test. For instance, to evaluate the efficiencies (as measured by variations in output), of alternative processes, CEO M.K.Trisal's team at GE Motors turned to a statistical technique called anova (Analysis Of Variances). Explains Raj Thiagarajan, 57, who with his shocking mane of white hair and a bristling white beard looks every inch what he is-the spirit of GE's 6s initiatives: ''6s is the ideal tool for sharpening the decision-making process in companies. It helps companies collect data, translate it into information, and inter-pret this information. One need not know mathematics as software like minitab helps translate data into information.''

With 4,000 Black Belts and 10,000 Green Belts across its businesses, and 6s related savings of $2 billion in 1999 alone (6s-related training costs: $465 million), GE, globally, today is a comprehensive 6s company. With its 4-pronged approach the company has been able to emulate this in India too. CEO Bayman expects the 6s culture to become part of the organisational exoskeleton and impact all the company's 'next-big' initiatives. That includes Jack Welch's fourth objective for GE, after Globalisation, Services, and Six Sigma: e-Biz.

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