What are the Basics of Six Sigma: What Every Business Should Know

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a methodology offering organizational tools to improve the capabilities to manage their business process. This can increase performance by decreasing process variation reducing defect rates and improving the employee spirit. This can improve the product quality by contributing the high profits. In this process, statistical and data analysis are managed to reduce the defects and improve the cycle times by reducing the manufacturing defects by more than 3.4 defects per million units. Six Sigma certification helps to meet these demands of the organization. It is just like martial arts certification course where Six Sigma professionals begin with the White Belt and become the master with the Master Black Belt certification. 

Six Sigma Certification

Six Sigma certification implies that you got a certain level of training with an understanding of the concepts involved in a quality improvement methodology. This ensures that Six Sigma-certified professionals get better exposure to the Six Sigma body of knowledge to meet the minimum standard of competence in Six Sigma certification along with its implementation.

The Six Sigma certification consists of five levels of belts –

White belt, Yellow belt, Green belt, Black belt, Master Black belt. 

Withal, there is no compulsory to complete all the belts in the Six Sigma certification belt. You can select any of these levels of belts based on your career objectives.

Belts of Six Sigma Certification

• White Belt 

Six Sigma White Belt certification provides the demonstration and understanding of the basic level of Six Sigma methodology. This certification reflects the knowledge of the basic history, definition, and structure of the discipline. This Six Sigma certification assists the team in the local problem-solving solutions and changes management system of an organization.

• Yellow Belt

Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification is a candidate who has learned the basic knowledge of Six Sigma but still can not lead the project on their own. These candidates are responsible for the process development mapping to back up the Six Sigma projects. Yellow Belt certified candidates participate as one of the core team members on a Six Sigma project. Additionally, they are responsible to run small process improvement projects using PDCA( Plan, Do, Check, Act) methodology. Yellow Belt projects are backed up by the Green Belt or Black Belt projects to maximize the cost-saving strategies for the statistical process control using DMAIC methodology.

• Green Belt 

Six Sigma Green Belt certification can be considered as the first level formal training covering Six Sigma methodologies. This Green Six Sigma certification provides a thorough understanding of process improvement under the guidance of Sig Sigma Black Belt professionals. This course helps in learning the in-depth concepts of the Six Sigma tools to help employees to apply the necessary strategies to their work to improve their efficiency. Six Sigma Green Belt certified professionals understand the thorough aspects of the Six Sigma methodologies which includes DMAIC ( Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control).

• Black Belt 

Next, after the Six Sigma Green Belt is the Six Sigma Black Belt certification. Here, the Black Belt professionals help other team members to perform, implement, interpret, and apply Six Sigma at an advanced level of proficiency. All the concepts of the DMAIC model are covered as part of learning in the Six Sigma Black Belt certification training. These professionals help team members by demonstrating leadership, understanding team dynamics, and assigning the team members roles and responsibilities to get Six Sigma projects. In this way, Six Sigma Black Belts are considered one of the most advanced levels of the Six Sigma certification program. Also are regarded as the experts who can take the initiative and guide an organization too big profits with better efficiency.

• Master Black Belt

Six Sigma Master Black Belts are experts in leading and educating all levels of employees in an organization with the Six Sigma tools and methodologies. These professionals guide leaders by aligning Six Sigma projects with the organization’s plan to drive further business with continuous improvements. 

Master Black Belt Six Sigma certified candidates are inspirational innovators and leaders. They always seek new ways for aligning the business practices with Six Sigma to seek improvement across all the departments in the business processes. 

• Champion 

Champions in the Six Sigma certification guide multiple teams through organizational resources and support helping to remove roadblocks if any. The term ‘Champion’ means great proficiency in the Six Sigma methodology by approaching to streamlining the business processes.

Leading the project from the initial phase to the execution is usually carried out by outside resources to complete the project successfully. Champions have good vision and are passionate about work, intending to get positive change.

Key principles of Six Sigma certification

Six Sigma follows a few of the key principles to manage the organizational structure by reducing waste and increasing revenue.

• Customer Satisfaction
• Time Management
• Catch the problem and focus on it
• Remove variations and barriers
• Communicate clearly with proper training to the team members
• Be flexible and Responsive
• Involve and use resources as needed
• Make improvements in a systematic manner

Customer Satisfaction

The main goal of implementing Six Sigma is to make the maximum benefits to the customer. This is possible to establish a standard of quality matching the customer demands as per the industry standards.

Any organization will want to retain its customer. Indeed, this can be a significant factor to determine the success of the firm. However, customer loyalty and retention can be expected as a result of customer satisfaction.

Many surveys suggest reasons most customers not returning to the organization are due to dissatisfaction. This can be due to the customer’s experience or employees’ attitude. So implementing Six Sigma in an organization can reduce this kind of dissatisfaction from the customers. An increase in the experience of the Six Sigma professionals in the organization can in turn help to achieve customer satisfaction.

Time Management

Six Sigma methodology teaches to apply the data principles to achieve the common goal of the business by helping the employees to manage their time effectively resulting in efficient business. The Six Sigma professionals set SMART goals by focusing on the three main key areas – performance, learning, and fulfillment.

For example, under learning, a candidate of Six Sigma can ask themselves about how often interruptions take from particular tasks and how many interruptions need attention.

Similarly, in underperformance, the candidate can consider the practices to help them achieve their professional goals. For this, there needs to be an action plan resulting in which employees can give 30 percent more efficient efforts.

Catch the problem and focus on it

During business processing, it is the responsibility of Six Sigma-certified professionals to catch the problem and focus on resolving it. This involves gathering the data by concentrating on the refinement of the business. Specific problems are lined up and are attempted to broadly change the product quality.

Sometimes, most projects can embark on and end up extending their decided deadline because of changes in the project scope or can be due to the shift in the management policy.

Six Sigma methodologies can help the project set up a team of experienced employees from all levels within the department and the organization. This way the tasks can be identified by leading projects to longer cycle times.

Such methodology can help organizations work on shorter cycle times for Six Sigma projects by sticking to the particular schedule by reporting a reduced cycle time of up to 35 percent.

Remove variations and barriers

Identifying the problems by looking into the ways of reducing the defect opportunities is often streamlined to remove variations in the quality of the product. It is a way to look into mistakes to reduce waste by achieving quality efficient solutions and working over it.

Communicate clearly with proper training to the team members

Six Sigma fundamentals deal with helping all the team members to know the common goal of the project by maintaining the progress bar. Six Sigma methodologies cause enormous changes and require specialization. Advanced certification in Six Sigma is important to reduce the risk of project failure to ensure the entire process runs smoothly.

Be flexible and Responsive

Change in Six Sigma focuses on a hand-in-hand process by identifying the faults and inefficiencies. Change and managing the changes can be painful by maintaining a low price to strive to attain the business processes. 

Involve and use resources as needed

Integrating the part of Six Sigma methodologies and strategies involves process improvement with the right decision. These decisions are decided as per the standard of the industries or organizations. Six Sigma processes help to give collective efforts with insights as needed to improve the quality. 

To improve team and process management skills of the team, organizations provide training to the team members including teaching Six Sigma tools and measurement methodologies.

Make improvements in a systematic manner

Six Sigma involves a lot of frequent changes. Employees with the Six Sigma certification are ready to embrace the changes. This involves random changes along with backing up the data as and when required. Data-based arguments show workers about the changes, like where the change has come from and how to make the appropriate decision. This makes it easy to know the changes occurring in the organizational process. Scientific and systematic approaches and tools have collection, quantification, and analysis of the data like DMAIC, 5S, Kanban boards, and many more.

Business Benefits from the Six Sigma Certification

• Increase in the profitability
• Reduced costs
• Efficiency improvement
• Developing effective strategies
• Become leader
• Learn to maintain the standard of the organization
• Competitive advantage
• Multiple opportunities

Increase in the profitability

Six Sigma certification provides one of the steps for any organization to increase profits. Having Six Sigma certification will help the employee to take necessary steps when needed to streamline the process by reducing the workload. This ensures the highest quality services and goods of the organization. Additionally, it is obvious to think of producing faster services and products while maintaining and augmenting their quality. 

Reduced costs

Organizational optimization and fixing any processes are unnecessary draining of the resource. This can be done with the help of Six Sigma-certified candidates who has better knowledge about resource management with effective time management. The primary benefit of Six Sigma certification is to identify and remove any waste across different processes and activities. There is a direct impact of the production or manufacturing of products, goods, or services on the cost of the organization. Through the Six Sigma training, you will learn to make cost-effective discussions while working on the rework cycles along with focusing on the service issues and resolving them at the right time. 

Efficiency improvement

One of the facts of Six Sigma certification is it creates the standard process to implement and enhance the business goals that ease to meet the business goals effectively and efficiently. The reallocation of resources can ensure the process streamlines every step to attaining an efficient product or service. This way Six Sigma training can help organizations to analyze the data by identifying the problems to generate effective strategies for mitigating the effects to ensure a better efficient result.

Developing effective strategies

Learning Six Sigma can help you identify the core requirement of the customer by maximizing the effort to serve the customer with good values and standards. Measuring customer value and focusing on efforts to improve the necessary strategies can help in increasing customer satisfaction. This process to create and support efficient and effective processes and strategies can help an organization to meet operational excellence with a strong customer satisfaction base.

Develop leadership quality

With the Six Sigma certification candidates can develop the needed infrastructure to solve the problem with the accountable transformation of the processes and operations. This develops the trust factor where transparency across all levels is maintained and where every employee can drive the organization toward success. Maintaining the critical approach of ensuring the process to sustain the optimum efficiency can lead to the project starting up with tangible solutions.

Learn to maintain the standard of the organization

Each organization monitors the progress of its different projects by allowing the delegation of tasks to multiple personnel. This monitoring is done by the experts or the experienced employees of the organization who can be referred to as Six Sigma-certified professionals. The aim is to achieve the standardization of different processes across multiple departments to look through the data for insights into the appropriate solution to any problem.

Competitive advantage

Today every organization looks for every bit of advantage to stay competent and relevant in the market. Having employees in an organization can instantly give a competitive advantage to other competitors in the market. This can add an advantage of reduced costs, increased efficiency, and profitability to give a competitive advantage.

Multiple opportunities

Having Six Sigma certification can give a gateway for multiple opportunities in the industry. Such employees in the organization can raise the bar of the employee and organization in the market.

Final thought

Every organization wants to raise its competitive scope in the industry. They are always in need of Six Sigma professionals who can help them to understand the tools and strategies to reduce waste and increase their revenue in the market. Hence, Six Sigma certification can be a powerful tool for any candidate to earn a better-paid salary in the top organizations across the world. 

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