Six Sigma and Beyond: Statistical Process Control, Volume IV

To implement the SPC program in a nonmanufacturing organization, we still follow the PDSA model. Specific characteristics are as follows :

• Plan:

  • Executive management awareness

  • Employee training

  • Council selection

  • Planning and brainstorming

  • Mission statement development

• Do:

  • Activity assessment and process mapping

  • Policy and procedure development and deployment

  • Measurement system criteria development

• Study:

  • Employee suggestion, recognition, and reward system development

  • Quality improvement action teams (from suggestions)

  • Management internal system assessment

• Act:

  • Customer-driven continual improvement

  • Long- term cultural change

  • Executive management awareness and training

The model's success is dependent on management's role in the implementation process and, specifically , in the role of the organization's leadership. Some items of concern for implementing a successful SPC program are as follows:

• Implementation must be top down.

• There must be constancy of purpose.

• Teamwork must be used.

• SPC must be used widely, not only in specific areas of the organization.

• Planning must occur.

• Integration of results must occur.

• Customers must be the focus.

• Communication with suppliers must occur.

• Internal communication must be open .

The difficulty of implementing an SPC program in a nonmanufacturing environment is in the intangibility of the service and the fact that it is hard to think of measurable metrics. Of course, neither of these should be acceptable barriers to successful implementation. For example, if we are content with 99.9% good quality we accept the following:

• 2 million documents will be lost by the Internal Revenue Service in a given year.

• 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

• 1,314 phone calls will be misplaced by the telephone communications services every minute.

• 12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.

• 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

• 2 unsafe landings a day will occur at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.

• 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled per hour .

• 291 incorrect pacemaker operations will occur per year.

• 880,000 credit card magnetic strips will be encoded with wrong information.

• 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will occur in the next 12 months.

• 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed daily.

• 10% of all airline luggage will be mishandled, and 3% of all checked luggage will be lost en route.

And the list goes on. Obviously something is wrong with this picture. In these cases, we do not have a tangible product, yet some serious problems can occur ” especially serious if they happen to you.