Six Sigma has been around for over a decade and as such it has been deployed at lots of companies around the world. More than 75% of the fortune 500 companies have deployed Six Sigma in one form or another. Some companies have chosen not to call it Six Sigma due to copyright or other issues. They have a similar approach but may call it by a different name (such as STRIVE, MEDIC, etc).

Some of the more famous companies who are using Six Sigma are:

• General Electric
• Motorola
• Caterpillar
• Microsoft
• Home Depot
• Philips
• Allied Signal
• Xerox
• Chevron
• Dell
• WIPRO

Feel free to add other companies to the list by responding to this message.

Additional examples by sectors which are using Six Sigma:

• Banking: Bank of America, American Express, HDFC, HSBC
  
• Call Centers: ICICI OneSource, Accenture, Satyam BPO, IBM Daksh
  
• Hospitality: ITC Hotels, GRT Hotels
  
• Hospitals: Apollo Hospitals
  
• Retail: Reliance Retail
  
• Telecom: Bharti Cellular, Vodafone, Siemens
  
• Software: Wipro, Satyam, Acenture, Infosys
  

The more difficult question is - Who is not using Six Sigma? or Who cannot use Six Sigma?

 

Six Sigma can be applied in all industries/companies as work always takes place in processes and the following hold true for every company (in any industry).

Everything that anyone does is a part of a process. A process is efficient or inefficient depending on the output to input ratio. (this ratio could be productivity measure, cost measure, time measure or any other useful metric)

 

Very few processes are defect free and most have unacceptable level of defects or delays (as per industry standards, company's own philosophy towards defects or based on customer expectations). Here, for many processes there is an internal customer (instead of or in addition to an external customer).

Meeting customer (internal, external or both) expectations with reasonable cost is a key success criterion.

 

Variation in process inputs or improper controls result in reduced efficiency or dissatisfied customers, which increases costs and breeds further inefficiency.

Six Sigma requires that you define success criteria for key processes, eliminate defects (or reduce their severity or occurrences), and measure outcomes for exceeding industry standards or creating new benchmarks, thereby leading to competitive advantage in terms of cost or value for customers. 

 

Can Six sigma and Business Intelligence coexist? What kind of conflicts may arise?

Dear Yatin,

In my opinion, BI analyzes facts & data and makes predictions on market trends, sales expectations etc. If BI identifes a potential problem or opportunity for improvement, it would be ideal to start a Six Sigma project to attack the opportunity and reap the benefits. Hence, both BI and Six Sigma should be closely integrated where BI feeds ideas for Six Sigma projects and Six Sigma ensures that problems are solved in the best possible way.

Other thoughts?

SJ

Dear Yatin,

Six Sigma definitely analyzes the data and identifies the relations / dependencies between the business critical variables. We can fine tune / conduct ANOVA for sensitivity analysis for better forecast / predictions.

This topic has focused on companies who have announced FORMAL use of Six Sigma as a way of doing business. There are thousands of companies (virtually all large successful companies) who use techniques covered in Six Sigma body of knowledge for data driven decision making.