Question

Instructions(without plagiarizing): For my gas station venture that I plan to own some day please describe Six Sigma and how small businesses can benefit from using Six Sigma. Choose one of the functions or one that you have found helpful from and explain how you could use one of the methods of Six Sigma to improve the function of my gas station venture below;

• Infrastructure (leadership)-Through leadership by example, build a company-wide commitment to responsiveness to customers
• Production-Achieve customization through implementation of flexible manufacturing. Achieve rapid response through flexible manufacturing
• Marketing-Know the customer. Communicate customer feedback to appropriate functions.
• Materials Management-Develop logistics systems capable of responding quickly to unanticipated customer demands (JIT).
• R&D-Bring customers into the product development process
• Information Systems. Use Web-based information systems to increase responsiveness to customers.
• Human Resources-Develop training programs that get employees to think like customers themselves.

Answer 1

Six sigma is a continuous improvement methodology focusing on elimination of defects in a product / service. It is a statistical tool which denotes the fraction of defects in a population and helps to find out the underlying causes, which can be gradually eliminated to bring the defect proportion in a process to minimum possible level.

On a gas station, the six sigma methodology can be used in operations process ( refilling, checking the air pressure, oil change, alignment checking, correcting the flat tyres, billing etc) of the station, where any shortcoming on the part of customer service needs to be counted and corrected. Some of the possible issues can be filling of the wrong fuel or engine oil, incorrect measurement of pressure, wrong bill, longer than normal service time, damage to the vehicle due to negligence etc. Using the six sigma methodology, instances of these issues which ultimately lead to customer dissatisfaction can be counted and possible underlying causes can be found. The root cause of the defect occurrence can be resolved and the number of defects are observed again. The process continues till the defects reach a minimum level. Once the condition is reached where defects are no longer reducing even after best possible efforts, it can be said that this is the limit of the process. Now, the process needs to be redesigned so that defects can be further reduced.