12 IEE Manufacturing Engineer | February/March 2005 SIX SIGMA has been sweeping the business world with remarkable results to the bottom-line of many organisations since its adoption in the late Eighties, driving breakthrough improvements in product and service quality. Today Six Sigma as a business strategy has been proved to be successful in reducing costs of poor quality, improving cycle times of various processes, eliminating errors or defects from processes, enhancing customer satisfaction and so on. I have been quite often asked by a number of senior managers of various organisations as to whether Six Sigma can survive for long and if so, how long will Six Sigma survive for? What does the future hold for Six Sigma in those organisations that have been seriously implementing it? This paper makes an attempt to critically analyse the above questions www.iee.org/manufacturing and provide the author’s personal perspective about the future of Six Sigma. The paper will also give a brief insight into the recent developments and trends in Six Sigma. Six Sigma has proved to be a successful business strategy to achieve competitive advantage in many world-class companies such as GE,Motorola, ABB, Sony, Honeywell and Texas Instruments for nearly a decade. Based on the evidence of several new Six Sigma journals, magazines, websites, textbooks, seminars, workshops, conferences and the amount of training going on, Six Sigma still appears to be on the way up. I personally feel that Six Sigma will evolve over time like many other initiatives we have witnessed in the past. However the key concepts, the principles of statistical thinking, tools and techniques of Six Sigma, will stay for many years, irrespective of whatever the ‘next big thing’ will be. I also believe that the Six Sigma toolkit will be enriched by the continuous emergence of new useful tools and techniques, especially in the software, finance and healthcare applications. I also like to raise the point that Six Sigma promotes the concept of statistical thinking for both engineers and business leaders. Statistical thinking – consisting of core principles such as process, variation and data – may be used to create a culture that should be deeply embedded in every employee within any organisation embarking on Six Sigma programmes. Some of the emerging research trends of Six Sigma include: integration of Six Sigma with lean thinking and agile manufacturing; development in new application areas such as healthcare, finance, sales, human resources, software engineering; integration of Six Sigma with other quality improvement initiatives such as ISO 9001:2000, and EFQM Excellence ANALYSIS: SIX SIGMA A perspective on the future In my personal opinion, Six Sigma will be around as long as the projects yield quantifiable financial returns to the organisations’ bottom-line ‘‘ ’’ WHAT IS THE FUTURE FOR SIX SIGMA? A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE THAT LOOKS AT THE RECENT DEVELOPMENT OF THE STRATEGY AND ITS POTENTIAL IMPACT. By Dr Jiju Antony