The fact that Six Sigma's foremost developers and exponents, specifically General Electric, Motorola, and Maytag all sent jobs offshore for cheap labor pretty much speaks for itself. This is not to say that the Six Sigma toolbox (primarily well-established TQM methods) does not work if used diligently and systematically but it applies to a rather limited range of problems. Lean manufacturing, as developed by Henry Ford, is far more effective. It applies to pretty much everything, and anybody with a high school diploma (Ford did not even have that) can master the basics. Lean requires a no-layoff policy (or else the workers won't support productivity improvements) which means management cannot ship jobs offshore for cheap labor. Ford didn't have to and he would probably have fired any of his executives who did.

Six Sigma is in my opinion the wrong tool for health care. Health care needs ISO 9001 to eliminate quality problems that translate into harm to patients along with thousands of dollars in excess costs. I am not even sure control charts for things like hospital acquired infections and so on should be used because every such incident is an assignable cause and not random chance. That means every MRSA infection or whatever requires a corrective action request or quality action request.

I do see that ISO has developed a standard for DMAIC, which might be helpful in systemizing the use of Six Sigma. The Automotive Industry Action Group's CQI-10, Effective Problem Solving, seems far more straightforward than DMAIC and applicable to a far wider variety of problems.

You forgot to list your Magnificent Seven tools for the article...or do we have to pay to see? How is that different from Six Sigma practitioners that you de-cry in the article?

As I mentioned in another comment, Six Sigma contributes to what I've seen popularized as "The 8th Waste" - under-utilizing the brainpower of the people doing the tasks. I have a buddy that chooses Kepner-Tregoe as a way to drive problem solving into the hands of the masses. The notion of "belts" tends to foster inappropriate elitism, and constrains the organization to require big efforts to solve small problems. If a problem is in people's natural "line of sight" they should be given tools and resources - and accountability - to solve their own problems.

The only shortcoming of that is when a process issue crosses multiple organizational boundaries. In my experience, those are projects that warrant facilitation by "heavy hitters."

That being said, I wouldn't entirely blame the consultants and trainers, though they should know better than to rely solely on "a**es in classes." I still maintain that the right leaders, committing the right way, can establish an organizational "infrastructure" that allows Lean and Six Sigma to function in those processes that cross organizational boundaries.

Let's see, everyone knows that the foundation of Six Sigma is utter rubbish, so we drop that and add in Voice of the Customer ... we're heading back to the future with Deming !  Even chief scammer Mikel Harry says Six Sigma is "80% TQM".  Why not drop the entire 20% of rubbish that Six Sigma adds and get back to quality !

To the other commenter, the 7 basic QI tools aren't proprietary or secret. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Basic_Tools_of_Quality

To Jay's point. I agree that it's malpractice, and unhelpful, for a hospital to be using all manufacturing examples in teaching improvement methodologies. That's just lazy on the part of whoever is doing that.

Six Sigma is for any type of organization that wants to achieve levels of quality approaching perfection. Reaching this level of performance will never come easy or cheap. Fortunately, moving toward this goal can be taken one step at time.

Start with the basics: Good supervision, good documentation, good training. Make sure you are gathering accurate data on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, process performance, and financial performance. If you don't have these basics in place you should be working on them, not looking for the next step.

Once you've mastered the basics move on to Lean, which is about eliminating waste. Use tools like 5S, Value Stream Mapping, Pull, Flow, Poka-Yoke, and Jidoka to improve the efficiency, reliability, and profitiability of all your processes (whether manufacturing or not) everywhere in the organization.

Finally, move on to Six Sigma which is about reducing variability and improving quality to near perfection. Use the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control methodology to make sure you're solving the right problems, solving them in the right way, and solving them for good.  

Some organizations will always complain about how hard Six Sigma is - as if acheiving world class results should be easy! Other organizations will follow the steps, do the work, and reap the rewards. Every organization gets to decide which kind it's going to be.

Going from 3-to-5 sigma is easy. Staying at 5 sigma is hard. Going beyond 5 sigma takes a few more tools.

The Magnificent Seven Tools can be learned quickly and easily given a problem to solve and data to work with. They are:

• Excel PivotTables to summarize defect data (every multimillion dollar project I've ever done starts with PivotTables.
• Control charts to show defect rates over time and monitor the improved process.
• Pareto Charts to laser-focus the improvement project.
• Histograms to show deviation from customer requirements in manufactured products.
• Ishikawa (Fishbone) diagrams to capture the results of root cause analysis
• Matrix diagrams like an action plan or checksheet.
• Process flow diagrams like Value Stream Maps and Spaghetti diagrams.

I've never needed hypothesis testing or DOE or a plethora of "Long Tail" Six Sigma tools to solve problems, because I rarely work with a factory floor. Most of the time, the factory is pretty smooth, but the surrounding "service" processes like sales, orders, purchasing, payments, etc. are flawed, causing customer dissatisfaction, lost profit, waste and rework.

Learn the "Short Tail" of tools that will solve most problems facing businesses first. Then add the rest.

Stop trying to turn everyone into a statistician. It's wasteful.

When you eliminate the "Long Tail" tools and focus on the Magnificent Seven, Six Sigma and Lean become easier, a lot easier. When I work with a team or three, give them some just-in-time training and drag them kicking and screaming through the problem solving process, they learn how at a gut level.

I include the cost of the QI Macros in my training so that everyone has tools to make Lean Six Sigma easy. Training people without giving them tools is silly. To make Six Sigma easy, people need tools that make it easy.

When we make Six Sigma easy, more people will embrace it. When they are successful, they'll tell their friends. Word of mouth and "word of mouse" will trigger a tsunami of adoption that will benefit everyone--companies, employees and customers alike. An explosion of adoption will keep every consultant busy for decades to come.

That's my mission: create 100 million "Money Belts" using the tools of quality to start solving problems every day in ways that simplify, streamline and optimize products and services around the globe.

Be a Money Belt!