Participant Interview: Anees Merchant (Mbb And Lean)- Program Manager: Eclerx.

Anees, Lean certified and MBB from Benchmark Six Sigma, explains how you can derive tremendous benefits. He shares a project where he transformed 9 months training (leading to 95% accuracy on the floor) to a 2.5 months training program (leading to 99% accuracy on the floor).

With thirteen years of a remarkable experience, Mr Anees Merchant owes his career progress to Six Sigma. Read on...

Q1) Tell me briefly about your career Journey so far.

A) Started my career with McDonalds as a Manager and from there have been associated to service Industry. In the last thirteen years I have worked with McDonalds, Wipro, Stream International and currently with eClerx Services Ltd. In the last thirteen years I have been associated with Quality functions as part of core Operations functions. I am currently heading the Business Excellence team (consisting of Transitions, Knowledge Management and Business Solutions).

Q2) Has Six Sigma impacted your career? Have you reaped any benefits from it in your personal life?

A) Yes definitely, in fact Six Sigma changed the way I look at things at work and in personal life. First at work, I have been able to implement many improvement projects and also launch many new activities with Six Sigma concepts. I have implemented QPI (Quality Process Initiatives), Consultancy services at my current company which would have not been possible without Six Sigma. Apart from the one listed, I have been able to get an award from one of our clients because of a Six Sigma initiatives. I owe my career progress in eClerx to Six Sigma methodologies.

Q3) How precisely do you apply Six Sigma skills in your current job at eClerx? What were the pain areas? Were the targets/goals of the project met? Please elaborate.

A) In current company (eClerx) I have used Six Sigma extensively. However the projects, processes, tools where it was used I did not name it Six Sigma. I have tweaked and customized to a great extent to meet company, client and my needs in order to achieve the same results in a structure environment. The reason for this approach was that in our company (earlier years) there was an resistance towards Six Sigma, however things have changed recently.

One of my best projects where I have deployed Six Sigma was for a Supply Chain process, where we were managing a data management process for our client (Global Fortune 500 client). This process had large volume of data being processed every day with approximately 10,000 business rules, 38 types of transactions, 7 systems to either update or refer and direct impact to Online / Offline sales and Factory. The transaction quality of the process stood at 95% with errors impacting either a factory or sales shutdown.

We initiated a Six Sigma Black Belt project and through series of sub projects (Green and Yellow belt) we were able to get the Quality Scores from 95% to 99.8% with a productivity improvement of 30%. This not only impacted the customer's bottom line but also top line as we were able to reduce the time to sales considerably.

Q4) Which Six Sigma methodologies do you use most often?

A) DMAIC is the commonly used methodology. However there are certainly other good tools like FMEA which we use practically every day. However I have chose to use Six Sigma methodology in a different way. Currently we have customized Six Sigma in two of our services / processes - Transition and Consulting Services. We are able to use the same approach of Six Sigma but have added flavours of Lean, Six Sigma Tools and Operations Management as our core tools / methodologies.

Q5) How was your learning experience at Benchmark?

A) I have gone through MBB and Lean Certification from BSS. My experience in both the occasions has been overwhelming and would recommend all my colleagues and friends for BSS training. The training experience has been one of the best and VK brings in a lot of practical experience along with his training.

Q6) What sort of SS Projects have you working on in past? Kindly mention some.

A) Some of the six sigma projects including the ones mentioned earlier in this questionnaire are

• Quality improvement project in a Supply Chain Management process

• Sales team non productive hours reduction project

• Online Store Quality improvement project

• QPI Initiative

• Global Standardization of a Process

• Time to Market and Time to Sales improvement projects

Q7) Do you think anybody if willing, can learn Six Sigma? Or it is only meant for academically brilliant people?

A) It is not necessary to be academically brilliant in order to be good at Six Sigma. Yes definitely one needs to be good with their numerical and logical reasoning. But the most important aspect in learning Six Sigma is understanding its applicability in your day to day life. If you don't get that, however brilliant you may be in your academics you would never be a good practice lead of Six Sigma methodology.

Q8) Would you like to give any suggestions to us for improving our program?

A) I like the idea of calling your alumni or individuals from industry who have executed / implemented Six Sigma in their professional career. This is a neat introduction and would suggest you have a panel of individuals on your Benchmark fraternity who can approve or provide feedback to the individuals on their projects, career decisions, and last but not the least on how to go about implementing Six Sigma.

Q9) Would you like to tell us about your future plans? How will your Six Sigma learning benefit you?

A) In my current organization I will be moving on to take a new role of Solution, R&D and Pre Sales Development. Where I see a lot of my knowledge and experience with Six Sigma would be useful. As definitely in Solution and R&D development there are things which are unstructured and you have complex situations with no definite approach or solutions. In that case I would require all the knowledge and tools from Six Sigma to guide and implement the requested business requirements.

Q 10) Would you like to give any message for readers.

A) Don't learn Six Sigma for a degree or a training certification or just because either your friends or colleagues have learnt it. I would suggest you do some research on the internet in terms of what it takes to be a good Six Sigma practitioner. Also please understand that Six Sigma provides you tools and methodology, you should customize and tweak them to your needs as it is not a boiler plate which can fit all sizes. You should also try to use some of the other methodologies along with Six Sigma (as the industry and companies like it) because you can talk many languages (methodologies) and deploy the same. Some of the other tools/methodologies to look at are ISO and COPC which should help you in your day to day methodologies. Stay focused!!