Six Sigma Certification – Practical Applications in Retail
June 10th 2010 Posted at mba business cards
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Six Sigma Certification has a lot of practical applications in the business world. Any industry or organization that needs process improvement can benefit greatly from the use of Six Sigma, including retail stores and companies that are having problems with customer satisfaction, process defects, and other issues. There are many different ways that Six Sigma can be applied in this particular industry, depending on what is needed. It can be used to create a better solution to customer wait times when it comes to checkout lines, or even to figure out a better means of merchandising that is more appealing and attracts more customers. If you want, Six Sigma Certification can even be utilized to make the most out of marketing which can improve retail sales through advertising and bringing in more customers.
For the sake of a practical example, consider the checkout scenario. A store has ten cash registers, and only about five or six of them are open at any given time. It is wasteful to employ more people to open more registers in the situation, but customers are waiting between 5 and 10 minutes to checkout, which creates a decreased sense of satisfaction. The sales aren’t high enough to warrant opening more registers, but a process needs to be devised in order to increase the flow of customers and make people more satisfied with their transactions.
Six Sigma Tools can be used to map out a process that will streamline the checkout process and figure out where things are going wrong. Maybe you have customers with too many items all standing in the same line, or perhaps you have a cashier that is operating slowly. Perhaps it’s even the bagging process that takes longer because the cashier has to do it all. It might even be a slow and older computer system that you haven’t been able to afford to update. No matter what the issues are, Six Sigma Projects can help to find the issues, figure out where, why, and how they are happening, and help come up with an effective solution to fix them. After a successful Six Sigma Process, your wait times might go town to 4-7 minutes, which isn’t much of an improvement but it is a start.
With that, you can put a continuous improvement plan into place and work to keep decreasing that wait time until you have cut costs, added more to your bottom line, and increased customer satisfaction to a point where you can afford to keep making improvements and growing in your success. There are many other applications of Six Sigma Certification in retail sales, but this is just one example that you can consider.
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions – Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.
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