Many businesses today are implementing Six Sigma projects. They are struggling to:
- Determine the top customer issues
- Prioritize projects
- Collect information
- Analyze the causes of defects
- Implement improved systems
Six Sigma provides a systematic way of improving business processes based on customer needs and factual analysis of company processes. Business intelligence (BI) is technology devoted to accessing, analyzing, and sharing business information.
Organizations like General Electric are combining these two technologies in the form of Six Sigma intelligence, a framework for using information technology to pick Six Sigma projects, get results more efficiently, and ensure their long-term success.
Specifically, BI systems from companies such as Business Objects help organization-wide implementation of Six Sigma in the following ways:
More Effective Preparation
Many organizations struggle with choosing Six Sigma projects to implement. BI helps organizations prepare for the implementation of projects in the following ways:
- Customer profiling
Choose the most important customer segments to focus on and understand what drives customer behavior before implementing Six Sigma projects. - Collaboration
Ensure that members of the extended organization - companies, their partners, suppliers, and customers - cooperate on the highest-return Six Sigma projects, all working from the same data.
Faster Implementation
In today's fast-moving environments, Six Sigma projects need to be implemented quickly and efficiently. BI is essential for speeding up each phase of change management techniques such as Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC).
- Define
BI helps choose which process to improve, based on costs, the total cost of quality, and other factors. - Measure
BI helps collect and compare different measures to clearly measure the existing situation and set achievable goals for the project.
Learn more about BusinessObjects Process Analysis - Analyze
BI is essential for analyzing the causes of the observed problems and suggesting possible areas for improvement. - Improve
BI helps awareness and acceptance by communicating improvement and project reports to the rest of the organization. - Control
BI ensures any exceptions to the new processes are detected, communicated, and acted upon.
Increased Long-Term Success
Long-term design-for-Six-Sigma initiatives require broad employee access to a wide range of metrics across their organization. BI is essential for collecting and understanding these measures, providing an integrated view of the business across different processes, and a single view of the customer across different divisions. BI can also be applied to the Six Sigma process itself, to compare the success of different projects across the organization, to determine the factors that lead to that success, and share best practices.
Enterprise Performance Management
Six Sigma is one type of methodology adopted by organizations looking to improve performance. Enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions enable you to align people, processes and technologies around common plans to execute and optimize business strategy.
