Asian Basic and Applied Research Journal

Six sigma is a powerful business strategy that results in a significant decrease in defects, errors, or mistakes in service processes. It is a powerful methodology designed to accelerate service quality improvement by relentlessly focusing on reducing process variation and eliminating non-value added steps or tasks. Improved processes result in increased customer satisfaction, productivity, market share, business profitability, and so on. Six sigma provides business executives and leaders with the strategy, methodology, infrastructure, tools, and techniques they need to transform their organizations. Despite a number of six sigma success stories in manufacturing organizations, many service organizations are still not convinced of the benefits of introducing, developing, implementing, and deploying six sigma in the service industry. Six sigma efforts in manufacturing organizations are built on a solid foundation of measurable processes and quality management programs. It is frequently difficult to develop and apply quality measurements in service organizations. Furthermore, because of excessive "noise," many processes in the service industries are not well understood or controlled. The term "noise" in this context refers to an uncontrollable factor or event (for example, the emotions of the person providing the service) that occurs during the delivery of a specific service. Furthermore, in service industries, most decisions are made by humans, and the criteria are much less precise. In other words, in the service industries, people's decisions drive processes far more than in manufacturing. Unlike manufacturing organizations, service organizations do not relate activities in process terms, making it more difficult to establish a link between process measurements and service performance characteristics. This paper presents the findings of a survey conducted within the financial services industry with the goal of analyzing whether the six sigma practices are implemented in financial industries adequately or not.