Six Sigma systems empower any quality related issue in any industry, said Mr Amitabh Saxena, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Anexas Consultancy India.

Delivering the Business Line Club lecture on “Lean and Six Sigma – Career opportunities for management graduates” sponsored by Syndicate Bank for the students of Community Institute of Management Studies (CIMS), he said that those who undergo this course would learn a set of tools and techniques and they take up improvement projects in an organisation and come up with various processes to reduce defects, errors, cycle time to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

“Those who take training for four days are known as green belts, while those who take eight-day training are black belts. And, Six Sigma black belts are in demand in major industries,” Mr Saxena said.

Speaking about the origin of the system, he said that Motorola was the first company to embrace this system.

“During a management meeting at Motorola in 1979, a company executive proclaimed ‘the real problem at Motorola is that our quality stinks'. This criticism made the Chief Executive of the company, Mr Bob Galwin, to take this as a challenge and achieve five-fold improvement in quality in a span of five years,” he said.

Mr Bill Smith, an engineer at the company presented a paper in 1985 and established the correlation between the extent of repair a product underwent during manufacturing and its field life.

“Later, Mikhel Harry developed a structured Six Sigma approach. By adopting this system, the company saved about $15 billion in 11 years,” Mr Saxena told the students.

In recent years, some practitioners have combined Six Sigma ideas with lean manufacturing to yield a methodology named Lean Six Sigma. Lean manufacturing – addressing process flow and waste issues – and Six Sigma, with its focus on variation and design, are viewed as complementary disciplines in Lean Six Sigma, aimed at promoting business and operational excellence, he said.

Mr Saxena spoke about various methodologies such as DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve, control) used at improving an existing business process and shared examples of companies that have adopted these methodologies and how they benefited.

“SyndYuva” and “SyndVidya”, the two products of Syndicate Bank for the youth, were introduced to the students. Dr B. S. Suresh Babu, Director, CIMS, was present.

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