14. Defining the Software Infrastructure: Tracking the Program and Projects

With Dino Hernandez and Instantis, Inc.

It’s one thing to launch a corporate-wide change initiative like Six Sigma, but it’s totally another thing to evaluate the return on investment of the program across the corporation. Larry Bossidy, Jack Welch, and Jim McNerney made no question that the purpose of Six Sigma was to change the company and get measurable financial and business results.

An advantage you have over the early icons of Six Sigma like Larry Bossidy and his team at AlliedSignal is the access to a rich selection of information and process management resources to accelerate both the results and expansion of your deployment. These new tools offer the first step in managing the enterprise. This chapter covers the following general topics, with detail for each:

• Enterprise Management Fundamentals

• Enterprise Solutions

• Getting Started

• Fundamentals

• Available Packages

• Desktop Solutions

• Planning Solutions

• Executing Solutions

• Tuning and Expanding Solutions

In the early days of the AlliedSignal engineered materials Six Sigma deployment, all program tracking (number of Black Belts trained and certified, financial results of completed projects, and the performance of each business) was done by Excel spreadsheets and other simple software applications like Microsoft Project. I soon fell behind the power curve, and tracking became extremely time consuming and difficult.

We soon grew our own Internet-based software application specifically to track Six Sigma actions. It was called Viper X, named after the Six Sigma mascot, the Viper sports car. Now there are numerous options in the market that will allow you a turnkey enterprise-wide system. Tyco implemented an enterprise system in a very short period of time, as have several other large companies. In fact, Six Sigma consulting companies have scrambled to provide their own solution to the Six Sigma deployment market.

Six Sigma software solutions available today have a number of overlapping features and capabilities, but there is a clear distinction between networked, enterprise management applications and desktop project execution tools. Deployment Champions must rely on a portfolio of software solutions that allow for the right balance of personal flexibility regarding desktop project-level tools, but without sacrificing the capability to roll up results, track performance, and set strategic priorities within a centralized, networked management application.

For example, Table 14.1 shows a rollup of one of my early deployments. This report presented some cumulative statistics of the first three years of the deployment (1995, 1996, and 1997). The report included cumulative financial impact, operational metrics, and numbers of Belts trained. This report was put together using desktop applications—mostly Excel spreadsheets. A lot of time and energy went into this report. But, with the enterprise systems available today, I could have generated this report with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Table 14.1 Longitudinal Statistics for an Enterprise-wide Six Sigma Initiative

Teams that design their information systems well and employ an effective balance of project tools and program management solutions are able to do the following:

• Complete projects more effectively.

• Apply tools more consistently.

• Track and report more immediately.

• Collaborate more easily.

• Realize greater program results sooner.

Enterprise Management Solution Fundamentals

Any initiative that has the capability to efficiently track, manage, and align project-level activity to corporate-level strategic objectives and business priorities has a high probability of success. Different organizations achieve differing levels of visibility and control over their initiatives directly proportional to the investment they commit to the systems required to support their teams.

At the beginning, the initiative leaders use software to simply track their Six Sigma programs and strategies in spreadsheets, personal project tracking software, and other desktop tools. However, these standalone, desktop approaches cannot meet the needs of a team with managing more than a handful of Six Sigma projects or strategies.

These shared local files and ad hoc communications flowing between the team members to track results quickly breaks down from manual errors and conflicting versions of the information as the number of projects and team members increase. You can imagine the kind of manual work required to put together this report on operational results for a single division of a company (see Table 14.2). You would be begging for an automated enterprise system.

Table 14.2 Longitudinal Statistics for an Enterprise-wide Six Sigma Initiative

A next-level solution is to establish a basic data-sharing infrastructure. These solutions are usually built on a general-purpose platform like Access or Project Server/Sharepoint, or are borrowed from a corporate database already in use for other systems. These internally configured solutions provide some level of centralization and a common repository of project information.

They can be expensive to create and are difficult to maintain, and are therefore normally limited to a few specialized features. For a business that is growing rapidly or expanding the scope of its Six Sigma initiatives, systems of this type usually hit their envelope of capability quickly.

Specifically developed, enterprise project portfolio software solutions provide a central database of Six Sigma project and program information, offer a common web-based interface for users, and enforce workflows for the following:

• Project selection

• Work assignments

• Progress reports

• Tracking of metrics and financials for each project across the enterprise

With this level of infrastructure in place, the team benefits from real-time access to its entire portfolio of Six Sigma project information and reporting for review and analysis. These systems also perform a valuable compliance role by assuring best uses of the intended tools and defined roadmaps supported by the system. However, these software packages are focused on the execution side of Six Sigma and overlook the need for aligning the project portfolio to the strategic priorities of the company.

Beyond the core enterprise project portfolio capabilities, leading-edge solutions track the following:

• Day-to-day project activity and tools.

• Measure how well the entire portfolio of projects (and each project individually) align with the key objectives:

• Objectives defined within the organization’s overall corporate strategy.

• When deployed, these solutions effectively enable an organization’s strategic plan and the Six Sigma project portfolio to become one and the same.

Enterprise Solutions: Getting Started

Dedicated project information systems are required to transform operational and strategic alignment from a series of loosely coordinated team meetings, training sessions, or executive retreats into an essential element of day-to-day business. With these systems in place, every member of the organization, regardless of location or role, can literally remain “on the same page” as to the overall expectation and the progress to date required for the team and for the full portfolio of projects underway.

Any software solution or solution suite designed to address these integration challenges must provide some combination of all of the following attributes:

• Capability to aggregate projects and project data aligned to specific strategic initiatives.

• Project selection capabilities to assign, prioritize, and measure projects based on their specific strategic contributions.

• Universal web-based access to avoid IT inconsistencies and to assure accessibility.

• Flexibility to coordinate any variety of process initiatives or desktop applications that are in use within the individual business units.

In the implementation of this solution, the deployment managers must work aggressively to

• Assure full compliance to the basic day-to-day workflow and reporting infrastructure contributing to the overall metrics of the initiative.

• Effectively integrate (or mirror) the system reports to the metrics and reports tracked by the executive managing the team.

• Maintain and continuously manage the knowledge base and post-project reporting so that effective results and learning stemming from earlier project efforts can be more widely coordinated or more widely duplicated in other projects.

Enterprise Solution Requirements

A popular Six Sigma maxim is “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This is especially true for Enterprise Six Sigma initiatives. At the executive level, the Executive Team will have difficulty in gaining accurate and timely insights into the workings of a global portfolio of projects and project teams. To make effective and timely leadership decisions and strategic suggestions becomes virtually impossible without insight into the daily workings of your teams.

For example, 3M’s Six Sigma deployment at one point consisted of literally thousands of projects and project teams across the company. Without an effective tracking, measurement, and alignment solution, the 3M executive could not effectively do his/her job as a leader, manager, or strategist.

Early Six Sigma deployment teams who first lead the charge to migrate their Six Sigma initiatives from project by project efforts into overall strategic efforts made substantial investments to create internally built solutions to manage the tracking, alignment, and collaboration within their teams.

Today’s turnkey solutions from companies like Instantis, PowerSteering, and iSolutions offer not only proven systems that are ready to run but also offer workflows and best practices refined by the input of their large communities of Six Sigma customers who use the software each day. Effectiveness of a solution needs to address the full lifecycle of a Six Sigma project and full scope of collaboration required within the initiative team. The essential capabilities include the following:

• Alignment to strategic objectives.

• Project leadership:

• Collect project ideas and develop into projects.

• Tracking of project team, tools, and deadlines.

• Alignment and validation of project financials.

• Allocation of teams and resources.

• Enterprise strategic leadership:

• Track projects individually or as a portfolio.

• Tracking and reporting of all program results.

• Identification and sharing of best practices.

Alignment to Strategic Objectives. If a project is completed and aligns to the overall business goals, does it still add value? Alignment to the overall goals of the business is essential for the success and buy-in for any process improvement initiative. To ensure strategic alignment all the way through the entire project portfolio, an enterprise solution has the capability to

• Establish strategic hierarchies as they cascade across an organization.

• Track projects and results as they align to each defined strategy.

• Communicate strategic expectations across the organization to focus project selection and prioritize resource commitments.

Figure 14.1 shows a partial screen of just one strategy: health, safety, and environmental. There would be screenshots for each strategy and strategic metrics.

Figure 14.1 Sample screenshot of strategic actions for the safety and environment strategic goals.

Project Leadership: Collect Project Ideas and Develop into Projects. A successful, dynamic, and widely embraced Six Sigma initiative requires a steady diet of good ideas from across the Six Sigma team and the organization as a whole. To make this happen, enterprise solutions require (1) an open door for new ideas and (2) an effective process for how they are assigned and evaluated within the team. By working from a shared enterprise system, each idea can be passed to differing contributors or other members of the team to be further filtered, developed, and better defined.

Because the act of identifying, prioritizing, and selecting high-impact projects is the soul of Six Sigma, placing these actions into a systematic process is true to the form of Six Sigma. Key to this idea of the development and selection process is instilling evaluation criteria to specifically address the strategic potential of any idea relative to the overall goals of the organization.

From an executive’s perspective, an enterprise system allows the team to accept a far more aggressive flow of ideas and handle them easily through an automated and empirical process to make better project choices. The enterprise system should automate the acts described in Chapter 9, “Committing to Project Selection, Prioritization, and Chartering,” which addressed project selection. Critical features include the following:

• Easily accessible Internet-based portal to collect ideas from team members, business units, and even partners, customers, and vendors.

• Scoring criteria for both business and strategic value of the idea (see Chapter 9).

• Collaborative capability to allow multiple team members from across the organization to each contribute to single project opportunity.

• Workflow to structure the contributions and approval processes required as an idea evolves into a project.

Tracking of Project Team, Tools and Deadlines. Managing the day-to-day execution of a project is the bread and butter of any performance improvement enterprise system. A by-product of a Six Sigma deployment includes the effective tools and roadmaps for completing projects. If the team and its systems cannot execute effectively at the project level, any attempt to roll up results or to expand the initiative will not be valid. If each of 500 or 1,000 Six Sigma projects would be tracked as shown in Figure 14.2, imagine trying to keep track of the progress of the entire portfolio manually. How attractive is it to just use a few mouse clicks to get the information you needed?

Figure 14.2 A partial screenshot of the progress of an actual single Six Sigma project.

To add some challenge to this requirement, project teams (like their businesses) are widely distributed and come from many areas of expertise. The enterprise application platform provides each team member and their leadership a shared touchstone to collaborate and coordinate on every phase of the project. The application must be able to provide every team member with not only their expected assignments and due dates but also the recommended tools and any supporting context or information they can leverage to best execute their contribution to the team. Expected capabilities should include the following:

• Flexibility to tune workflow and project roadmap configurations and deliverables and tasks from the team members.

• Manage workflow and approvals of shared document and completed tasks over the course of a project.

• Email alerts and other notifications whenever project deadlines are at risk.

• Integrated learning content and guides to help all team members communicate more effectively.

Alignment and Validation of Project Financials. In Six Sigma, the cost of poor quality (COPQ) and the program results must all boil down to dollars that are quantified. This is how Jack Welch and Larry Bossidy brought Motorola’s Six Sigma from a initiative focused on productivity to an initiative focused on financial results.

Given this, any Six Sigma tracking infrastructure must provide a rich and fully configurable financial tracking and measurement capability for every project and for the overall project portfolio. Above and beyond a tracking and accounting capability, an enterprise system designed for Six Sigma initiative support should address sign-offs and validation of project-level performance and provide financial forecasts at each phase in the project. Features should include the following:

• Financial representative validation and sign off at each phase of the project.

• Reconciliation of the financial data from the projects with the financial data maintained within the organization’s accounting systems.

• Spreadsheet file import and export between the tracking system, enterprise accounting systems, and the project-level tasks and tools.

• Flexibility to support any variety of financial processes, currencies, closing dates, and reporting formats required either at the project level or between the enterprise systems.

Allocation of Teams and Resources. At any level, process improvement is a team effort. Without the ability to classify and allocate resources, it is not possible to build and manage teams and improvements effectively across the initiative. Making sure that the most strategic projects have the right resources keeps the businesses very busy. The system’s resource management capabilities must allow project leaders to allocate tasks and communicate with team members as needed to complete project deliverables.

More sophisticated enterprise solutions can track availability of resources through scheduling features and timesheets to track hours and costs both per project and over the entire initiative. Additional capabilities can effectively mirror the organizations HR files by not only tracking time and availability, but also skill levels, work history, and specific domain and project expertise. Systems should include the following:

• Ability to choose team members from lists matching both the desired Six Sigma training level required for the project as well as any project-related experience or affiliation with the business unity involved the project.

• Track time committed to each project and availability as needed for future projects.

• Align effectively with internal HR systems to both import and export data pertaining to each contributor’s skill levels, compensation, and history of experiences.

Track Projects Individually or as a Portfolio. The success and importance of a project are usually measured in financial terms. Teams can only achieve these returns by keeping their focus on delivering on the individual set of metrics targeted for each project. For example, here are the bullets for a single project out of over 500 similar projects done for the year:

• Increased granular sulfate capacity by over 50 percent for $2 million additional income year to date:

• Cause and effect analysis and FMEA applied to process.

• Integrated Six Sigma, total quality, and maintenance excellence effort to exceed projected entitlement.

• Developed and initiated new control tools and methodology.

• Granular capacity increased with 570,000 tons produced (year to date) as compared to 449,000 tons for 1994 full year.

You can imagine trying to track all 500 projects to forecast the actual financial impact of the Six Sigma program. A key role in any enterprise management system is to not only track the tools and phases of any given project, but also the operations-level performance within the project to deliver targeted and predictable results. In Six Sigma, y = f(x, x, x). How well you manage your inputs (process variables) is how likely you will be to reach your key y’s (project metric). Features include the following:

• Support for tracking multiple metrics within any given project.

• Support for any variety of reporting timeframes, tracking metrics, and targeted ranges.

• Capability to track differing project phases differently as the core processes targeted by the project are tuned and improved.

Tracking and Reporting of all Program Results. At the end of the day, the goal of any improvement initiative is to achieve results. Without some type of global view of the overall progress of each project and the progress of all of the projects as a portfolio, both the project teams, team leaders, and managing executives are blind to spotting trouble spots in the projects or recognizing areas of strong opportunity.

Dashboards and reports have long been a part of any enterprise-level management solution; however, with a Six Sigma tracking solution, these reports are tied directly to the project team and workflow to allow the managers to have immediate access to the project-level information and team members required to fix it. Reporting capabilities include the following:

• Drill down from high-level company-wide reports to project-level deliverables.

• Reliable and timely executive-level reporting data built from the ground up by firsthand project data.

• The flexibility to modify time, teams, areas of focus, and other variables to allow team to process and present data in whatever manner best suits their need.

• Capability to segregate reports and results along strategic lines or by specific project teams, geographies, or business units.

• Ability to roll up non-similar initiatives and differing team reports into unified executive reports to enable a “big picture” view for executives.

• Automation of ongoing project status reports to eliminate time-consuming data gathering and report creation that hampers many project teams.

Extensible Knowledge Sharing and Best Practices. Dramatic results are directly correlated to successful application of effective methodologies. Because Six Sigma programs consistently produce innovative ways to define business processes, the challenge is transporting innovations throughout the enterprise. Workflow and knowledge management capabilities work in concert within an enterprise system to clearly lay out defined best practices and available tools allocated for each project team. Even best practices can be continuously improved.

By maintaining a central knowledge base within the organization, successful projects can be easily leveraged and reapplied in other project teams with far greater speed and certainty than if the program needed to be developed independently. Features should include the following:

• Shared knowledge base of available project tools and reference documents.

• Repository of all completed project tools, documents, contributors, timelines, and results.

• Contextual recommendations and learning materials to provide guidance as to best practices tied to key process within the project workflow.

Adapt to Unique Business Needs and Systems. No one business is exactly like another and neither are their processes. This presents an ongoing challenge to software solution providers who must develop features that appeal to the wide cross-section of customer needs but be easily adaptable to the unique need of each project team. From seamless integration to the installed enterprise process, to financial and measurement systems, to the ability for each team to tune processes that work best for their needs, flexibility is a mandate of any enterprise-tracking solution. Capabilities need to include the following:

• Services-based architecture where differing contributions from differing applications can be widely shared and easily connect over standard Internet-configured networks.

• Configuration consoles where individual users and authorized team leaders can set personal settings, team settings, and rights and responsibilities for the entire team from a simple interface.

• Modular workflow capability where team and initiative leaders can adapt the system to reflective differing process improvement methodologies, processes unique to their organizations, or flexibility required for differences within specific business units.

• Import and export capability to freely move data and tools from any variety of desktop applications into a central knowledge base, project files, or financial segments of the system.

Results and Expectations. When teams and organizations take the step to begin managing their projects and performance management in an automated environment, it is common to see average project cycle times reduced by 50 percent or more and improvement of project performance by as much as 20 to 30 percent. The combined effect of simplified collaboration with the capability for more rapid awareness and response to problems in a project, enabled by the system, are the primary drivers behind the reduction in project cycle times.

The capability of the systems to allow the project teams to better evaluate ideas based on their strategic business needs and execute best practices are the primary drivers for improved average project performance. With a project portfolio management system in place, successful projects are more easily identified and more widely reused by teams anywhere in the organization. This capacity for leverage works to both lower project cycle times and increase average project performance equally.

Enterprise Solution Packages (Alphabetically Listed)

Instantis provides Enterprise Performance Improvement software for Global 2000 companies like Lockheed Martin, McKesson, and Xerox that have deployed Six Sigma and other structured, project portfolio-based business improvement methodologies. Instantis software automates the end-to-end execution, management, and reporting of these methodologies. With a unique capability to provide a bridge between strategic priorities and execution, Instantis solutions allow industry leaders to deliver improved financial results and better alignment of goals and activities throughout the organization. Learn more at www.instantis.com.

i-solutions helps organizations get more from their investment in critical business programs such as Six Sigma, IT, and R&D that drive growth and create value. They provide a range of enterprise software solutions, based on their flagship i-nexus product, that have been designed from the ground up to meet the real needs of Six Sigma VPs, CIOs, CTOs, and other business leaders. Combining the latest web technology with powerful ROI-driven functionality, these solutions are helping a growing number of global organizations to align their project portfolios with business objectives, accelerate the delivery of tangible benefits, and leverage what they learn in project execution. To find out more about how i-solutions can help you to reduce project cycle times, increase project success rates, and cut the cost of managing your portfolio, visit www.i-solutionsglobal.com.

PowerSteering Software provides executives with real-time visibility, strategy alignment, and enhanced program and team effectiveness. For more information, visit www.powersteeringsoftware.com.

Desktop Solutions

At the desktop level, today’s solutions allow Black Belts and Green Belts to work from preconfigured templates and feature sets to support any variety of Six Sigma tools. Process mapping and project planning have all been fully automated and, in many instances, specifically refined for use in the context of any variety of Six Sigma projects. With these advanced tools, Black Belts and Green Belts can apply tools to more projects more easily and contribute results more quickly and widely than ever possible before. The essential Six Sigma desktop toolset requires a mix of the following capabilities:

• Statistical analysis

• Simulation

• Process mapping

• Project planning

• Reporting and presentation

• Spreadsheet

From no-cost open source solution suites to combinations of market-leading application suites costing as much as thousands of dollars per desktop, there is a wide selection of options and tradeoffs available to meet the project-level needs of the individual Black Belt and Green Belt. Some options to consider include the following:

• Statistical Applications. Minitab and JMP are the industry leaders in providing practitioners with the advanced statistical analysis capabilities to perform the correlations and regression analysis required to isolate root causes and prioritize key areas for improvement. For more information, visit either www.minitab.com or www.jmp.com.

• Simulation Applications. Crystal Ball is built upon a Microsoft Excel platform. Crystal Ball offers a package specialized for conducting simulations and determining distributions and optimizations that provide the foundation for more in-depth statistical analysis and process validation. For more information, go to http://www.decisioneering.com.

• Microsoft Office (Excel, Project, Visio, and ppt). For a one-stop desktop solution, the Microsoft suite is hard to beat for not only its scope of features, but also for its widespread acceptance and familiarity to business users around the world that serves to facilitate file sharing and ease of adoption. New developments from Microsoft have included templates designed specifically for Six Sigma and have begun to address capabilities for easier files sharing or integration into underlying enterprise applications. By virtue of its sheer size of its user base and feature set, at the desktop level, Microsoft is the ten-to-one leader in the tools arena.

• Excel—The industry standard for complete spreadsheet, analytical, and financial content. Its veritable ubiquity and flexibility allow it to not only be close to a one-size-fits-all solution for most practitioner tools, but it also establishes the .xls file format as a standard for import and export of any numbers-based information between systems and individuals.

• Project—Able to set schedules, manage dependencies, and assign resources. Project is easily the “next best” Six Sigma solution within the Microsoft suite. The application’s rich feature set and ease of use make it the preemptive choice for project-by-project process management.

• Visio—Though limited in its overall functionality relative to other MS applications, and despite the capability to mimic its functionality in other applications like Excel and PowerPoint, Visio is still the preferred choice for any practitioners who develop process maps on a regular basis.

• PowerPoint—Like Excel is to spreadsheets, PowerPoint is also an industry standard for presentations and information sharing between teams. Though virtually unused as a Six Sigma project solution application, PowerPoint is essential for tollgate review presentations and reporting project and program results up and down an organization.

Other Applications. QI Macros, built upon an MS Excel platform, offers a comprehensive library of prebuilt Six Sigma tool templates to immediately provide resources for the project teams. For more information, go to www.qimacros.com.

iGrafx provides a family of business process analysis tools that help organizations understand, analyze, and optimize their processes for key corporate initiatives, including Six Sigma, Lean, and others. For more information, go to www.igrafx.com.

SigmaFlow is designed as a full-service desktop suite, and is the leading provider of Business Process Analysis (BPA) software that encompasses process design and simulation capabilities in a single, integrated environment. Process improvement professionals choose SigmaFlow because of the Six Sigma workbench capabilities—it saves time and dramatically improves results.

Planning Your Solutions

Like any Six Sigma project, implementing the software required to support your initiative requires a collaborative and coordinated effort to be effective. Well-thought-out and well-designed processes and planning lead to effective software solutions that can better automate and accelerate the performance of the team. The importance of this planning and preparation in the design of your supporting software infrastructure cannot be overstated:

• Map the process and needs of your teams.

• Strike the right balance of desktop and enterprise solutions.

• Leverage the processes and solutions you already have as much as you can.

• Invest in the solution most appropriate to your needs both for today and the future.

• Integrate your software vendors, Six Sigma trainers, IT teams, and business groups into the decision making.

Executing Solutions

A common phrase used often in new initiative rollouts and change management is, “Start small (either in scope or feature), think big, and succeed often.” Rome was not built in a day, and neither are most enterprise performance improvement initiatives.

To avoid organizational whiplash (and its correlated backlash), do not try to do too much too soon. It is very important that both from a process and technology point of view that you allow for the amount of time that it will take to get a system and its teams to full capability. It also takes some actual experience to understand what the final system should look like.

A suggestion for effectively starting small is to test your systems’ processes within one or two smaller business groups in order to iron out any quirks. You will also identify any needs unique to your organization to be addressed in a controlled and safe environment before the system can be rolled out overall. Most Six Sigma companies deployed the enterprise system after the program was initially deployed. At that time, they had a better understanding of what they needed.

An alternative approach to starting small is to release the management system widely, but with only a limited feature set. This allows you to effectively promote that this new system is for the entire organization and that it will be the “way we do business,” but allow the users to start with a manageable set of new requirements to learn and that you can be sure are ready to run. From there, the system can then be expanded incrementally as organizational learning and understanding increases.

On the subject of thinking big, groups need to understand that any effort to build and design solutions to automate and improve a business process will expand into a de facto process audit. Experienced teams recognize this and allow for this review phase in their rollout schedules. They will then bring contributors into the systems planning discussion, not only from the project teams who will be working on the system, but also from the financial and manufacturing groups who will have processes touching the systems and will need to be accounted for in the design and rollout of the systems and its underlying processes, workflows, rights, and responsibilities.

As for succeeding often, if you work in manageable steps according to a well-thought-out overall plan, there will be near certainty that your incremental progress will be positive. However, in the event that the fundamentals of the plan need revision or another look, by working in small incremental steps, you will have the opportunity to make more effective adjustments as you go and take advantage of the learning possible in each preceding step before planning your next ones.

Tuning and Expansion

Successful software initiatives replicate successful improvement initiatives. The software champions work to continuously improve and strive to delight their customers. A successful software system is never “done.” It should always remain a dynamic and living effort supported by continuous feedback and suggestions by its users and feature improvements by the vendors.

Good systems are designed to adapt to this feedback, and good systems managers are able to listen and facilitate to this dialog with the users. A key aspect in managing this feedback is to allow the time for users to settle in and spend time on the system. This can allow the managers to get a better view of what are larger issues that can be addressed within the system to best meet the greatest percentage of the individual requests.

Just as Six Sigma is not an isolated process targeted only for manufacturing, your Six Sigma software tools and enterprise systems do not have to be limited to Six Sigma project work. Today’s solutions can be expanded easily to support project management needs in IT teams, supply chains, sales and marketing, and many more.

A key benefit to expanding the application of your software resources is that it creates a larger user base to gain value and improve not only the overall ROI of your software investment, but also the base of resources available to support them. By deploying an enterprise system that works in supporting your Six Sigma efforts, the same system will need only minor modifications to apply to other, future change initiatives. A good enterprise system now leads to an accelerated and sharper set of change initiatives in the future.