Services Six Sigma: Knowing the Debates and Failure Modes to Drive Better

The challenges in lean Six Sigma implementation start from terminology to applicability to actual application and finally in terms of experiencing the change. Six Sigma projects are being used as an event response antidote rather than as a culture in organizations. Could there be a debate on your "X sigma" versus my "Y sigma"? Should lean practice be the front end or the back end or somewhere in the middle embedded in the Breakthrough Strategy has been a matter of debate among practitioners for many years now. Ego centric debates, a reason to justify failures, a failure to identify the purpose are contributors to the dilemma. Historically, the genesis of Six Sigma carries a setting of manufacturing yards, so should that be a reason to brand it as unsuitable for services, or is there a need to "dilute" the rigor in methodology or search for alternative techniques to facilitate application in a pure services context? Now, in an era of Industry 4.0 and Big Data Analytics, does Six Sigma continue to have a relevance? Should machine learning algorithms remain in the ever evolving list of tools and techniques within the Six Sigma book of knowledge? This chapter aims to address the above questions and more number of questions that we experience on a day-to-day basis in Six Sigma applications in the real world.