Lean Six Sigma in Finance and Accounting Services for Enhancing Business Performance

Literature Review

Six Sigma is a business improvement approach that seeks to find and eliminate causes of defects or mistakes in business processes by focusing on process outputs which are critical in the eyes of customers. Six Sigma has often been presented as something different from TQM (Bengt et al., 2008). Six Sigma is different from other quality initiatives because its main focus is to improve customer value and efficiency, and ultimately enhance bottom line of the organization (Pyzdek, 2003). Six Sigma is considered to be an important management philosophy, supporting organizations in their efforts to satisfy customers. Six Sigma is defined as “A business strategy used to improve business profitability, to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of all operations to meet or exceed customer’s needs and expectations” (Kwak & Anbari, 2006). Six Sigma principles can be used to shift the process average, help create robust products and processes and reduce excessive variation in processes which lead to poor quality (Shah et al., 2008). Motorola saved $15 billion during initial 11 years of Six Sigma deployment. With Six Sigma, AlliedSignal has had productivity gains of 6 percent in manufacturing in a two year period, and General Electric produced more than $2 billion as customer benefits (Lucas, 2002).