Six Sigma Case Study

What customers want from online businesses?

a. Variety of Products. Online consumers tend to acquire almost everything online. So, businesses should provide a variety of products to choose from by the customers. Customer’s needs and wants changes quickly overtime.They (customers) will never choose a single product over their lifetime, so offer a wide selection of products.
b. Walk the talk. If business says 3-day delivery, it should be three days and not otherwise. Be true to customers. Being true begets goodwill.
c. Promptness on delivery. Some customers demand an instant availability of the products.
d. Being updated. Whether the products are new or an old one.
e. Personalized advertising. Every time customer received an e-mail,
They claim six sigma is not a revolutionary way of quality thinking but rather more on evolutionary thinking on quality development. Discuss why six sigma is evolutionary and not revolutionary.

I believed that six sigma is a product of evolutions to many quality standards we have from 1798 of Eli Whitney’s mass production and interchangeable parts to the present. What made six sigma different from other model is that it combined the elements of quality standards from different sources with a rigorous, controlled approach and well-publicized project successes.

The evolution of six sigma began with the concept of “logic filter”, a paper developed by Mikel Harry and Bill Smith in the Arizona State University. Harry developed a four-stage problem-solving approach called MAIC – measure, analyse, improve, control. This approach (MAIC) later became the road map for achieving six sigma quality. The MAIC was improved and became DMAIC.

The Six Sigma Quality Program of Motorola in 1987 established Six Sigma as the required capability level to approach the standard of 3.4 DPMO.This standard was used in products, processes, services and administration. However, at Motorola, six sigma was only a discipline problem-solving
Since then, different multi-national companies (i.e. GE) and companies from different industries have successfully implemented six sigma.

What are the difficulties in shifting quality standards from manufacturing to service?

Implementing six sigma in the service organizations requires a change of paradigm. This is so because service organizations deals with customers directly, a human being. Unlike in the manufacturing, six sigma is used to reduce defects of a product that company produced.

As mention in the article, customers expect faster and easier service at every point of contact. If they do not get it, the customer will go elsewhere thus losing a client and losing a revenue as well.It is a fact that looking for new client is much costly than retaining one. So, customer satisfaction is crucial to make six sigma successful in service organization. Companies relate daily to different customerswith different level ofsatisfactions. There are customer who like to have faster service while others prefer quality service. With this in mind, organization should be aware ofthe kind of customer they have to address customer