Globalization and instant access to information,products and services have changed the way customer conduct business - old business models no longer work. Today’s competitive environment leaves no room for error. Any service provider firm should delight their customers and always look for new ways to exceed their expectation. Six Sigma is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliche.

Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps companies focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. Why “Sigma”? The word is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The centeral idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many “defects” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to “zero” defects as possible.

There are three key elements of quality: customer, process and employee. Everything to be done to remain a world-class quality company focuses on these three essential elements.

The Customer
Delighting Customers
Simply just being good is not enough. Delighting our customers is a necesity, because if you don’t do it, someone else will!

The Process
Outside-In Thinking
Quality requires us to look at our business from the cistomer’s perspective, not ours. In other words, we must look at our processes from the outside-in. By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer’s needs and processes, we can discover what they are seeing and feeling.

The Employee
Leadership Commitment
People create results. Involving all employees is essential to quality approach.

To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3,4 defects per million opportunities in which an “opportunity” is defined as a chance for non-conformance, or not meeting the required specifications.

However and because i have been working with the six sigma culture for almost 5 years inside Egypt, I always see it a very advanced challenge to any management to convince employees with the concept of changing the way of thinking, so my question, is the SIX SIGMA the roadmap of customer satisfaction?. And my simple asnswer will be: It depends on the level of convincement of the employees otherwise it will end up with just re-allocating revenue or meeting targets and using new prestigious terms.