Key Points

• Adapting Six Sigma for service industries requires a shift in how we define defects in a primarily service-oriented sector of business.
• Service industry processes are complex and non-linear compared to the usual processes for Six Sigma, but are crucial to map early on to identify potential bottlenecks and weak points.
• It doesn’t take much of a shift to adapt Six Sigma for service-oriented industries, it is more about adapting to the usage of tools to fit the needs of your organization.

Adapting Six Sigma for service industries is easier than you might think. Service industries defy certain expectations when it comes to the services and goods provided. Ostensibly a customer-centered business, you’re acting more as a middleman in a retail context than providing actual solutions. That isn’t to say you can’t adapt the tools of Six Sigma to best fit your needs, however.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at how to integrate Six Sigma thinking into service industries. We’ll look at key strategies you can take, areas where you can adapt tools, and much more. So, if you’ve just brewed up your morning coffee, strap on in and join me to explore how Six Sigma can enhance your service industry organization.

What Is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a data-driven methodology intended to reduce variation, increase efficiency, and work toward constant improvement in workplace processes. Beyond the methodology, Six Sigma serves as a metric and philosophy to organize your business around. As a metric, Six Sigma refers to a production with an infinitesimally small amount of defects per million units. As a philosophy, Six Sigma guides the way we think about how to approach projects and develop services within our businesses.

There are a few key aspects of Six Sigma that you won’t see with other business methodologies. The heavy emphasis on data is just one aspect, but you’re developing structure and institutional knowledge. As such, Six Sigma isn’t just about reducing defects, but changing your organization from the top down for the better.

Countless businesses have adopted the principles, and the certification programs are a great way for students to get a leg up before entering the workforce. At some point or another, you’ll encounter Six Sigma in the workplace, and for good reason.

Key Principles of Six Sigma

There are a few key tenets of Six Sigma that hold for any organization using the methodology. They are as follows:

• Reduce Costs: One of the biggest areas of waste you’ll see in a business is on the production floor. When you get into certain habits, it can create unseemly costs. Six Sigma more than addresses this with its tool set.
• Improve Efficiency and Productivity: Going hand-in-hand with cost reduction, you’ll often find that your workloads become more efficient and productive over time. This is thanks to a culture of continuous improvement being established within your organization.
• Enhance Profitability: Naturally, if you aren’t spending a bundle on doing the work, you’re increasing the ways in which your company can turn a profit. This is a natural byproduct of Six Sigma practices, and a helpful side effect, I must admit.
• Meet Customer Expectations: Delivering quality goods and services promptly is a fantastic way to meet or exceed the expectations of your customers. Not only are you meeting their demands, but you should be exceeding them.
• Reduce Defects: Defects are going to be present in any good or service developed. However, Six Sigma gives you the means to aim for near perfection. Ideally, you’ll be minimizing errors and flaws in how you run your processes.
• Quality: The end goal of any Six Sigma initiative is delivering quality. Quality can be a loaded term depending on the industry, but you’re looking to enhance reliability, consistency, and up the overall quality of your outputs.

Six Sigma for Service Industries: Adjusting Tools for Your Needs

Now that we’ve touched on some of the fundamentals behind Six Sigma, how do you adapt it for service industries? Six Sigma for service industries can take a few different forms; after all, there is no universal means of adapting it for retail or restaurant businesses. However, this is to your benefit, as you can tailor your approach to best accommodate your needs.

Every organization is different, and finding what works best for your business is going to be the most difficult part of adapting Six Sigma for service industries. That said, we’ve got a few sure-fire strategies to get you started as you start on your way.

These strategies should hopefully up your productivity and efficiency, while also providing a stable foundation of internal data to gather metrics. This, in turn, enables your organization to make future decisions based on the data gathered, relying on hard empirical evidence to get solid results.

Defining Defects

Defects in manufacturing are usually easy to detect. This is where things simply go wrong in a process. The same doesn’t apply to the likes of service industries, however. Defining defects in your organization is going to be one of the most important things you’ll do. Further, it should be one of the very first things you do when setting out to develop your Six Sigma for service industries.

Areas you’ll want to take a closer look at are things like errors. These can be simple things, like simply entering the wrong information in a form, billing mistakes, or mistakes in ordering. Errors like this have a large cost in both time and money. Not only that, but your customer’s trust wavers when you make grievous errors like this in the first place.

Additionally, another area you might want to consider is something like delays. Service industries are going to have lines; that’s the nature of a customer-facing business. Figuring out how long these delays are and how to mitigate them is going to be a crucial step in developing your Six Sigma plan.

Map Service Processes

Unlike manufacturing, service processes in a service industry are going to be nonlinear and overall more complex. As such, it only stands to reason that you would want to map these out. Depending on the process mapping technique you’re utilizing, it can help to visualize the entirety of the process.

Not only are you getting a good grasp on the total steps of a process, but you’ve also got the potential to identify things like bottlenecks in the process. Eliminating these is going to be a top priority, so mapping them out ahead of time is valuable.

Focus on the Customer

Customers are the most valuable thing to keep an eye on when developing Six Sigma for service industries. As service industries are typically customer-facing, they take on a much higher level of importance than you would see in something like a manufacturing business.

As such, this is where you need to utilize techniques seen in Voice of the Customer to issue out surveys, gather up feedback, and monitor social media for the criteria that will define your organization’s Critical-to-Quality factors going forward.

Develop Service Metrics

Along with developing measurements for the likes of your processes and defects, you’ll want ot take a look at developing solid metrics related to your services. This can be things like customer satisfaction scores, time to complete sales, time spent with customer, and so forth.

As to what you do with those metrics, that’s entirely up to your organization. However, having these metrics on hand is how you’re going to fuel the steps

Look for Sources of Variation

Most variations you’re going to find with Six Sigma for service industries aren’t going to come down to the products you sell. Instead, it is going to be down to the services you provide. As such, looking for sources of variation can be a bit more difficult overall.

Looking for sources of variation is going to come down to looking at your current staff with tools like the Fishbone diagram, Pareto chart, and even hypothesis testing to isolate the causes of variation in your current services.

Improve Your Processes

As Six Sigma for service industries takes shape in your organization, you’re going to inevitably reach the point where it’s time to improve processes. Since you don’t have machines or workflows to optimize, you’re going to have to look at improving the quality of your employees. Process improvement is going to take the form of something like standardizing training, implementing technology, and designing processes to prevent errors in the first place.

Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for something a little extra after you finish up with today’s article? You might want to take a closer look at how to integrate Total Quality Management into your organization’s culture. This isn’t a difficult process by any means, but having some guidelines can help make the process much easier.

Additionally, you might want to consider looking at Six Sigma and design thinking. These methodologies are a great fit for one another and allows you to combine the deeply analytical approach of Six Sigma with the more creative energies of design thinking.

Conclusion

Six Sigma for service industries is a great way to optimize your organization. While it might not seem like a solid fit at first, you can easily adapt the tools and methodologies behind Six Sigma to make your business one that excels when it comes to reaching your customer expectations.

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