Professional Documents
Culture Documents
GE Six Sigma
GE Six Sigma
The Roadmap
to Customer
Impact
Making Customers Feel Six Sigma Quality
Globalization and instant access to information, products and services have changed the way
our customers conduct business — old business models no longer work. Today’s competitive
environment leaves no room for error. We must delight our customers and relentlessly look for
new ways to exceed their expectations. This is why Six Sigma Quality has become a part
of our culture.
Process Improvement:
Continuous Improvement, Reengineering
Productivity/Best Practices:
Looking Outside GE
Work-Out/Town Meetings:
Empowerment, Bureaucracy Busting
Low
1990 TIME
Key Elements of Quality...Customer, Process and Employee
There are three key elements of quality: customer, process and employee. Everything we do to remain a world-class
quality company focuses on these three essential elements.
...the Customer
Delighting Customers
Customers are the center of GE’s universe: they define quality. They expect
performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct
transaction processing and more. In every attribute that influences customer perception,
we know that just being good is not enough. Delighting our customers is a necessity.
Because if we don’t do it, someone else will!
...the Process
Outside-In Thinking
Quality requires us to look at our business from the customer’s perspective, not ours. In other
words, we must look at our processes from the outside-in. By understanding the transaction
lifecycle from the customer’s needs Customer’s
View of GE’s
and processes, we can discover Contribution
what they are seeing and feeling.
A B C
With this knowledge, we can Customer
Process
identify areas where we can add GE Process
significant value or improvement
from their perspective. GE’s View
of Its
Contribution
...the Employee
Leadership Commitment
People create results. Involving all employees is essential to GE’s quality approach. GE is
committed to providing opportunities and incentives for employees to focus their talents and
energies on satisfying customers.
All GE employees are trained in the strategy, statistical tools and techniques of Six Sigma
quality. Training courses are offered at various levels:
Quality Overview Seminars: basic Six Sigma awareness.
Team Training: basic tool introduction to equip employees to participate on
Six Sigma teams.
Master Black Belt, Black Belt and Green Belt Training: in-depth quality training
that includes high-level statistical tools, basic quality control tools, Change Acceleration
Process and Flow technology tools.
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Training: prepares teams for the use of
statistical tools to design it right the first time.
Quality is the responsibility of every employee. Every employee must be involved, motivated
and knowledgeable if we are to succeed.
The Six Sigma Strategy
To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. An “opportunity”
is defined as a chance for nonconformance, or not meeting the required specifications. This means we need to be nearly
flawless in executing our key processes. Six Sigma is a vision we strive toward and a philosophy that is part of our
business culture.
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