Six Sigma in Health Care

THE SHEFFIELD MBA RESEARCH PROPOSAL

TOPIC: SIX SIGMA IN HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

1. INTRODUCTION

In the world of globalisation and growing cut-throat market environment, the quality, skills and knowledge give competitive advantage to any organisation. The global market is very competitive, and to survive, organizations need to produce products and services of high quality to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty to stimulate top-line business growth.

In and attempt to manage this change, industry leaders embraced Six Sigma business strategy as a framework and solution for pursuing continuous improvement in process, customer satisfaction and also organisational profit. (Snee, 2004; Antony, 2007).

To understand the applications of Six Sigma in Healthcare Industries, we must first understand what Six Sigma is.

Six Sigma is a business management strategy. Six Sigma seeks to improve quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects and variation in manufacturing and business processes. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets. (adapted from Wikipedia, 2009).

The concept of Six Sigma was introduced by Bill Smith in 1986, a senior engineer and scientist within Motorola's communication Division, in response to problems associated with high warranty claims. The success of efforts at Motorola was not just achieving six sigma quality levels but rather the focus was on reducing defect rate in processes through effective utilisation of powerful and practical statistical tools and techniques. This would lead to improved productivity, improved customer satisfaction, enhanced quality of service, reduced cost of operations or costs of poor quality, and so on. (Antony, J. 2006).

Six Sigma clientele include a long list of well-established manufacturers like General Motors, Ford Motor Co., GE, Honeywell and many more....