Is Six Sigma worth it?
I want to get back into retail management (10 years prior experience) and have been told that I should take the Six Sigma classes offered through my local community college and that would help get a better paying job. Any truth to that?
It’s a weird concept to apply to retail. As the link says:
There have been a few retail companies that have attempted to adapt this methodology to their business with mixed success. Perhaps the most notable was former CEO Bob Nardelli’s attempt to adapt his systems from his former employer, General Electric, to the retail industry. There is one inherent problem with attempting to apply Six Sigma to retail. Retail=people, Six Sigma=defects. So, you have to look at your lacking areas as defects by your employees. Home Depot attempted to solve this by thinning out their workforce and implementing training programs for the remaining employees in order to reduce defects. On paper, this may work well but once the human factor was applied it led to massive frustration from the employees and the customers due to the lack of salespeople on the floor at any one time. Although the employees were better trained, they were now required to help 22.8 customers per hour rather than the previous 13.4. Other retailers are learning from these mistakes of the first big box retailers to attempt this and are tweaking the methodology to better suit their company goals.