Once the Design, Measure and Analyze phase have been completed in a Six sigma Project the Team has almost done the major chunk of work that needs to be done. The next phase will be the Improve phase and can be called as the reward for the work done in the earlier phases. An improvement can be observed in the form of returns on the investment that the team has made in the form of time, planning and execution. This is the phase where all the efforts of the team will show some results that can be shown to the management. This phase will act as a break even point for the project as one will be able to measure the success rate and the amount of savings that can be done in this phase itself in the real life scenario.
Once a project reaches the Improve phase almost all the data has been collected and analyzed. Now the team needs to sit and do a little brainstorming on how to bring in the improvements in the process or the whole setup to cut down on the defects and the defective processes. In the Improvement phase many suggestions can come up varying from small improvements in the raw material to the overhauling of the whole plant machinery. All these points should come from the data collection that has been done in the past few phases of the Process. There will be some improvements that can be easily implemented and worked by the team but few of the improvements may need high management intervention like changing a supplier who is supplying low quality raw material to the process or the organization.
Design of Experiment is extensively used in this phase for the fine tuning of the process. The Design of Experiment may even involve collection of data that will be called active data collection. although data was collected in the earlier phases also but that was passive data collection as the team doesn’t do anything after collecting the data in the earlier processes the data is just collected to study the cause and effect relationship of the processes. But in active data collection you collect data so that modifications and improvements can be made based on the data collected.
Thus the real action starts in the Improve phase where all the decisions taken are implemented, people working on processes are trained to do things the right way and major improvements are chalked and implemented in this very phase thus making it the most action oriented phase of Six Sigma.
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Article Source: http://blog.brainmeasures.com/2011/08/24/the-real-action-of-six-sigma-improve-phase.aspx
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