Total Quality Management - CII Institute of Logistics

Total Quality Management
5.4 Important Six Sigma Themes
1) Focus on the Customer
In a Tennis Tournament, if a player has an eye only on the scoreboard instead of the
ball, he or she cannot win the game. The player must focus on the ball. Likewise, if
a company has an eye only on the bottom line instead of the customer, it can neither
attain market leadership nor can improve its corporate profit substantially. The
company is the tennis player, the customer is the ball, and the bottom line
(corporate profit) is the scoreboard. This is the cardinal principle of Six Sigma. Six
Sigma is emphatic about the importance of achieving a quantum jump in profits by
meticulously and sincerely implementing everything from the customers’
viewpoint. The interesting difference in this tennis tournament is that one player is
playing with many opponents and is trying to win the game. The many opponents
mentioned here are the competitors in the marketplace. Thus Six Sigma is indeed a
corporate strategy that aims to achieve and sustain market leadership through
excellence in quality.
2) Data and Information Based Decision
All decisions in the Six Sigma environment are based on data, facts, and
information and not on intuition or guess work. Benchmarking key activities
using well-defined metrics against the best in class is at the heart of Six Sigma
process. Of course, even TQM uses Benchmarking as a theme but the extent of
metrics used with a clear focus on profits by eliminating failures and defects from
the customers’ angle is far greater in Six Sigma than in TQM. This in a way is
responsible for very high hit rate of success (83%) where as hit rate of success in
TQM companies is reported to be just in the vicinity of 25% to 40%. In the words
of Motorola , the connection between quality and benchmarking is succinctly
described as under:
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