Is Six Sigma Just For Large Companies? What About Small Companies?

Management Team Buy-In and Support
If your executive team is not fully supportive and proactive in establishing your Six Sigma Quality initiative, you will be wasting everyone's time. As with any successful initiative implementation, everyone's actions need to be tied to the initiative.

A useful exercise in determining buy-in is to list out all the individuals of the management team on a piece of paper. Then assign a positive, neutral or negative to each person signifying what you believe to be their support for the initiative. Your job, before beginning the implementation, is to move every single person to at least a neutral position, if not positive. Education can help with this goal.

Education and Training
Many educational programs currently exist; most provided by consulting companies. A list of the most reputable consultants can be found in the Six Sigma Consultants category of the iSixSigma library.

What training is necessary? Well, it depends on who is getting trained. Here's a snapshot table identifying the major groups of individuals, the suggested training agenda, approximate cost and duration of the training.

Training Your Business or Organization
Group	MajorTopics	ApproximateCost Per Person	Duration
Management Team and Champions	* Six Sigma Overview * Benefits and Case Studies * How To Implement Six Sigma * Tools and Resources	$1,000-$2,500	1-5days
Selected Six Sigma Leaders (Black Belts and Master Black Belts)	* Six Sigma Overview * Six Sigma Methodology and Tools * Statistics Training * Computer Application Training * ProjectSelection and Execution	$12,000-$50,000	4 weeks delivered over a period of 2-6 months
All Employees	* Six Sigma Overview * Benefits * What To Expect Going Forward * Simple Case Study and Exercise	Variable, depending on if taught in-house or if consultant (approximately $2,000 per day plus expenses) is used	0.5-1day

Resource Committment
As discussed above, Black Belts (BBs) and/or Master Black Belts (MBBs) need to be identified and trained. But more importantly, they need to be assigned to your Six Sigma efforts almost 100%; 50% application yields less than a 50% result. In addition to BBs and MBBs, you should be ready to assign 5-15% of key employees' time to specific projects.

Link to Compensation
We all work and perform responsibilities for a paycheck, right? Just as you expect your factory to produce Y widgets per hour and your bank to process Z deposits per day, you should expect projects to be contributed to and successfully completed in a prescribed time period. And employees executing well should be compensated well. The quickest way to initiative success is to tie results to the business bottom line, create performance goals, and compensate employees appropriately.

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