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Six Sigma has been the Pandora’s Box for companies in optimizing their business process. By using Six Sigma methodologies companies cut down on the number of errors generated by a process. The easy part is to follow the set methodologies of Six Sigma in optimizing a business process. The harder part is to integrate the process and to ensure efficiency in the optimized business process. BPM has been the answer to ensure efficiency in a business process.
BPM strengths lie in its ease of use. A user can easily locate the bottlenecks in a process and fix them. Thus, increasing transparency needed in a business process. Business processes can be refined so as to maintain integration between them. The flexibility offered by BPM suites is what makes handling a BPM operation effortless.
Real time data monitoring and accessibility helps in taking up a sensible decision making approach. BPM suites offer real time data when it comes to identifying who is the decision maker, what is the criterion for decision making, which task is being processed currently etc.
BPM suites lack tools which justify the reason of having an extra processing step/s to take up a decision. The optimized number of steps needed in a business process cannot be mapped based on an individual or a team’s intuition. To optimize the business process it is necessary that a statistical approach is chosen so as to keep the business process with minimal errors. This is where Six Sigma fits the bill by ensuring the resources needed to process a task are kept minimal and the quality of the output is not affected.
Implementation of Six Sigma ensures decrease in process cycle time, enhancement in the quality of output, reduction in the number of errors generated by a process etc. Six Sigma lacks the mechanism of gathering data to be fed so as to check optimization of a business process. The data needed for implementing Six Sigma methodology has to be fed manually which is a time consuming process. Use of BPM suites eliminates the need to feed data manually. Hence real time data needed by the Six Sigma tools for analysis can be provided by using a BPM suite.
This cyclical relationship between Six Sigma and BPM eliminates the loop holes in designing and maintaining your business process. The lack of knowledge on integration between Six Sigma and BPM tools to achieve business process optimization and process efficiency has resulted in low level of implementation across the companies globally. According to Peter Peterka president of 6Sigma.US ” the union (between Six Sigma and BPM) is ideal for providing long-term, enterprise-wide performance solutions.”1
Reference:
1. P.Peterka. (2006). Ezine articles. The marriage of bpm and six. Retrieved July 23, 2009, from http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Marriage-of-BPM-and-Six-Sigma&id=170886
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