How to start?

To BTDT,
At the risk of sounding a bit a crass, why would one need training to fire personnel?  HR could very well do that and have minimial to no understanding of Six Sigma.
My contention is this – termination of personnel is not that answer to an organization’s financial issues but a band-aid. Reallocating personnel to more value-added positions is far more beneficial to the organization, and to the employee. 
Unfortunately, there are certain individuals, who, by virtue of completing a course believe they can improve an organization by eliminating personnel – anyone can do that. And you don’t even need a Greenbelt.
Peace,
Dubya

Dubya:You are exactly right – we are making the same point. Elimination of people is an extremely short sighted ‘solution’ to deeper problems. Peter Senge calls it ‘fixes that backfire’. The CFO in this one company was completely focused on cost savings on a quarterly basis during strategic planning and project selection meetings. He finally asked me why I kept on suggesting that we should randomly fire 10% of the staff. I asked him why that was not a good solution.He told me that having cost savings as a single target for Six Sigma would drive behaviour that was going to have a bad effect on the company.It forced him to make the point that we should have other metrics for Six Sigma besides just cost savings, but it came out of his mouth instead of mine.BTDT

metrics if don’t exist need to be designed, BTDT gave a small but valuable example as to how to make the management pause and understand that there needs to be structured methodology for improvement or achieving business goals
my suggestion get the bosses come out with some vital metrics which measure costs in business and then start working on the critical ones identified
rgds