Page 140 - Operations Strategy

SomE Common THREADS 115

and errors and avoiding interruption due to network downtime. For Wipro, Six Sigma simply
means a measure of quality that strives for near-perfection. It means
● having products and services that meet global standards
● ensuring robust processes within the organisation
● consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations; and
● establishing a quality culture throughout the business.
Individual Six Sigma projects are selected on the basis of their probability of success and are
completed relatively quickly. This gives Wipro the opportunity to assess the success and learn
from any problems that have occurred. Projects are identified on the basis of the problem areas
under each of the critical business processes that could adversely impact business performance.
Because Wipro takes a customer-focused definition of quality, Six Sigma implementation is
measured in terms of progress towards what the customer finds important (and what the cus-
tomer pays for). This involves improving performance through a precise quantitative under-
standing of the customer’s requirements. Wipro says that its adoption of Six Sigma has been an
unquestionable success, whether in terms of customer satisfaction, improvement in internal
performance, or in the improvement of shareowner value.
However, as the pioneers of Six Sigma in India, Wipro’s implementation of the process has
not been without difficulties – and, they stress, opportunities for learning from these diffi-
culties. To begin with, it has taken time to build the required support from the higher-level
managers, and to restructure the organisation to provide the infrastructure and training to
establish confidence in the process. In particular, the first year of deployment was extremely dif-
ficult. Resourcing the stream of Six Sigma projects was problematic, partly because each project
required different levels and types of resource. Also, the company learned not to underestimate
the amount of training that would be required. To build a team of professionals and train them
for various stages of Six Sigma was a difficult job. (In fact, this motivated Wipro to start its own
consultancy that could train its own people.) Nevertheless, regular and timely reviews of each
project proved particularly important in ensuring the success of a project and Wipro had to
develop a team of experts for this purpose.

Some common threads

Before adapting any of the ‘approaches to operations’ that we have covered in this
chapter, it is worth considering the extent to which one should be influenced by the
experiences of other organisations, especially when packaged as ‘best practice’. It may
be that operations that rely on others to define what is ‘best practice’ are always limiting
themselves to currently accepted methods of operating, or currently accepted limits
to performance. ‘Best practice’ is not ‘best’ in the sense that it cannot be bettered, it is
only ‘best’ in the sense that it is the best that one can currently find. Accepting this may
prevent operations from ever making the radical breakthrough or improvement that
takes the concept of ‘best’ to a new and fundamentally improved level. Furthermore,
because one operation has a set of successful practices in the way it manages its opera-
tions does not mean that adopting those same practices in another context will prove
equally successful. It is possible that subtle differences in the resources within a process
(such as staff skills or technical capabilities), or the strategic context of an operation
(e.g. the relative priorities of performance objectives), will be sufficiently different to

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