Leaderboard

What keeps your business engine running amidst tough competition in today's environment? I strongly believe in 4 things that acts as a differentiator a. Customer Centric Approach - Have customer in focus in whatever you do. Historical studies have always shown it costs more to acquire new customer and effective management of existing customer assures you of continuous business which in turn benefits to invest in better ways to gain new customers. b. Productivity and Efficiency - Key mantra is to do more with less within committed timelines with the focus on better OpEx management. c. Drive a balanced scorecard - A successful organisation always drive a balanced scorecard, when it comes to cost, quality, productivity and customer satisfaction. It is not one at the cost of another. d. Motivated work force - who make a difference in driving the results for your organisation Organisations today adopt multiple buzz words (mapping to the mood in the market) to drive their organization business charter which some times can befuddle the very purpose of its existence and pull your objectives in different directions rather than supporting it. You need to have a "Pivotal Program" in your organisation which can give clarity to your business charter and help position all other programs around it. I see Lean Six Sigma as this pivotal program. Every organization today broadly categorizes its work into two parts - Run the Business and Change the Business. While Run the Business focuses on delivering day to day operational commitment, Change the Business acts as an enabler to support its customer and work force. For companies today to stay competitive, they need to be profitable. They need to ensure their Run the Business operates within the KPIs as demanded by the customers and the Strategic Initiatives of Change the Business should focus on addressing the root cause that is impacting my KPIs. A simple example is, giving better experience to your customer once he calls your customer care team (run the business focus) vs. enabling simple self help to resolve his query in few steps (change the business initiative). While it is rather easy said than done, an organization may have multiple programs, tools or professionals but if it is not structured, packaged and adequately blended, we will conveniently loose out on the core objective and digress from the goal which can lead to not only financial losses but also losing their valuable customers. Even a decision not to invest in any changes, still needs to go through a methodical approach to establish the fact on why not to make an investment. Lean Six Sigma - the pivotal program, not only fulfills all objectives as a metric, method, management and philosophy but also the 4 points I mentioned above. The outcome of a methodological Six Sigma effort can help reduce cost, improve profits, drive focus keeping customer requirements, create a knowledgeable workforce and above all use a data-driven scientific approach to arrive and sustain your results. I strongly see that other programs can be positioned around Lean Six Sigma as it opens up avenues like using a Project Management approach to implement a solution, Robotics to simplify tasks, Data science for advanced analytics etc., What is key to note is that these programs need to have a trigger and Lean Six Sigma is the trigger. Finally on my concluding note, for folks who are in a denial mode to accept the benefits of Lean Six Sigma, forget organizations, I personally see the existence of Lean Six Sigma concepts in our daily life. Be it to better time management, health management or wealth management, the concepts of Lean Sigma has its contribution.