SigmaWay Blog

By now, several of us are beginning to hear about Lean Six Sigma and are wondering what this is all about? Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a unique analytical business process available to facilitate continuous process improvement (CPI) which includes Champions, Black Belts and Green Belts that enables companies to drastically improve their profitability by monitoring everyday business activities minimizing waste and inefficiencies. CPI program tends to improve the operational, administrative and support functions of the company. Many successful companies, such as Motorola, use Six Sigma. Ranging from customers, stockholders, employees to suppliers all benefit from this business process. The following factors make LSS achieve its success: 1) Leadership commitment 2) Focused resources. 3) Common tools and language 4) Disciplined project approach 5) Bottom-line business measures. Improvements are made by working to reduce waste through a five-step process: 1) Identifying customer value  2)Mapping the value stream  3)Creating flow 4)Seeking perfection 5)Pulling based on demand. Read more about this aspect at George Aslinger's article link: 

http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/lean-six-sigma-business-transformation/articles/continuous-improvement-with-lean-six-sigma-for-beg/

Big data gives governments tools to discover more effective and innovative ideas on how to decrease poverty across the world. Proper application of big data and technology advancement can improve the circumstance of people currently impoverished. Before, collecting reliable data from all corners of a country can pose as a hindrance in the complete elimination of poverty but now this problem is solved by the advances in mobile technology. Reportedly, more than 85% people in the world have access to mobile phones, even if some of them are the poorest people which lead to greater data collection on the poor and availability of big data acts as a catalyst to help the poor people prosper. Data collected from cell phone call data records and an individual's bill payment history banks and other financial institutions can effectively evaluate a person's ability to pay back loans and determine their risk attitude. This helps the institutions to give credit to the required people through micro financing. Read more at:

http://www.bigdata-startups.com/5-applications-big-data-in-government/

Cloud computing can help companies reduce their e-waste in several ways. John Biggs of TechCrunch recently discussed the effect that a design change of Apple’s devices would have on the amount of e-waste.The company will switch from its current 30-pin port (the rectangular outlet that connects iPods, iPhones, and iPads to docking stations and chargers) to a smaller 9-pin or 19-pin port. According to Biggs 45 million devices will become “partially” obsolete as a result of this minor change. The United States throws away about 3 million tons of e-waste every year, including about 30 million desktops, 12 million laptops, and 30 million computer monitors. The amount of e-waste increases year-to-year at the highest rate (5%) of any category of trash. E-waste accounts for 20-50 million tons or 5% of all the world’s solid waste. With cloud computing  companies no longer have to purchase, repair, or replace hardware for an on-site IT infrastructure when they sign up for cloud-based solutions. They will not have to dispose of all of their obsolete or broken servers, storage devices, networking hardware, and cables every year. Second, cloud hosting companies utilize hardware more efficiently. They can host multiple applications and infrastructures per server. As a result, cloud hosting providers purchase relatively small amounts of hardware and fully utilize their servers, storage devices, and networking hardware before disposing of them. Third, companies that adopt cloud-based solutions do not have to frequently repair or replace their end-user hardware such as desktops, laptops, keyboards, mice, and monitors. To know more about reduction of e-waste using cloud computing visit:  http://www.onthenetoffice.com/blog/2012/08/e-waste/

A Geographic Information System (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. It helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared. There are a lot of advantages of using GIS technology. It makes data handling easier, covers large area, used for monitoring various things because of repetitive coverage, it is fast, can be used in inaccessible areas, unbiased, more accurate, reliable and economical. Data could be collected in several bands/ colors so it could be used for micro level analysis. GIS will help in decision making by government officials and in increasing transparency and accountability for good governance. It will help in management of natural resources, improved allocation of resources and planning, improved communication during crisis, cost savings by improved decision makings etc.

The effective use and implementation of Radio-frequency identification (RFID), GPS & data mining techniques in Public Distribution System (PDS) can facilitate PDS supply chain and promise eradicating mismanagement, corruption, trafficking, theft and anti-social elements. RFID provides highly accurate and detailed information by capturing the data and information at each stage of the supply chain, automatically. It also improves the safety and efficiency of the food supply chain. Location technology GPS can also be combined with RFID technology to automatically track and record the information regarding the field where the produce was picked, when and where it was transported and the current location of the produce. This also helps in reducing theft and trafficking. Data mining techniques based on the rule base classification model is used to identify the suspicious moving behavior of the objects. To read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/information-technology-articles/control-of-public-distribution-system-using-gps-gis-remote-sensing-with-data-mining-rfid-3393327.html

CRM (customer relationship management) analytics comprises all programming that analyzes data about an enterprise's customers and presents it so that better and quicker business decisions can be made. CRM analytics can be considered a form of online analytical processing (OLAP) and may employ data mining. As web sites have added a new and often faster way to interact with customers, the opportunity and the need to turn data collected about customers into useful information has become generally apparent. As a result, a number of software companies have developed products that do customer data analysis. According to an article in InfoWorld CRM can provide customer segmentation groupings, profitability analysis, personalization, event monitoring, what-if scenarios and predictive modelling. One of the major challenges implicit in CRM analytics is how to integrate the analytical software with existing legacy systems as well as with other new systems. To know about CRM analytics go to: http:http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/CRM-analytics

It is found that big data and healthcare analytics help patients to stick to their treatment plans following doctor's orders. According to a New England Journal of medicine report, despite having treatable ailments, about 125,000 people die in United States every year just because they don't take their medication properly advised by the doctors. According to a doctor, to overcome the problems, they needed to identify the gaps in scores and ratings which includes Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information set (HEDIS), Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (CAHPS) etc. As non-compliance hurts healthcare provider's goal of improving care and reducing costs, many organizations are handling the matter by growing their insights built from big data and analytics to deploy human resources like managers and social workers in better ways. Medicare, Medicaid, dual-eligible, and commercial plan members on care management strategies incorporate technologies such as big data, analytics and integration to improve health outcomes, enhance satisfaction and compliance, also increases income and lower cost. For populations who often have chronic conditions and don't want to comply with doctor's orders because of homelessness, financial instability, joblessness and emotional issues, one can use big data to solve the problem in a logistic-driven way to help those patients comply on their care plan. Read more at: http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/analytics/analytics-help-patients-follow-doctors-orders/d/d-id/1278717

Intelligent processing of data is essential for addressing societal challenges. Data could be used to enhance the sustainability of national health care systems and to tackle environmental problems by, for example, processing energy consumption patterns to improve energy efficiency or of pollution data in traffic management. 

To make the best use of big data now and in the future, government must have the right infrastructure in place. It advocates a data force, based on the successful nudge unit, to access data from different departments and identify where savings could be made. New data science skills will be needed across government, but it is more important is ensuring that public services leaders are confident in combining big data with sound judgment.

Closely linked to government's drive to make better use of big data, is its drive to make data open. Open data, particularly that in the public sector, is often big data – for example, the census, information about healthcare or the weather – and making large government datasets open to the public drives innovation from within government and outside. See more at: http://fcw.com/Articles/2013/09/25/big-data-transform-government.aspx?Page=1

5S is a methodology used initially to organize workplaces to be more efficient and streamlined thereby consistently striving for more outputs, lower costs and less waste. So in essence, as this is what Continuous Improvement is mostly about, 5S is one of the commonly used Continuous Improvement tools. 5S is widely believed to have originated or least initially widely used in Japan and the term 5S is derived from 5 Japanese words- seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke which loosely translated into English stand for: sort, simplify, shine, standardize and sustain. The principle activities taking place at each of the stages are: Sort - All unnecessary items, parts, files, supplies are removed from the area

Simplify – (or Set in Order) – A place is created for everything and everything is stored in its place

Shine – (Sweep) – Clean up the area

Standardize – Apply the same standard throughout (to other similar areas)

Sustain – Maintain the new standard and avoid slipping back to old habits

To know about practical recommendations to make 5S a key part of the Continuous Improvement machinery, regardless of the type of business visit:http://smallbizkaizen.com/index.php/2010/08/5s-business-benefit

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There exists price war among major cloud providers. Amazon Web Services announced to lower the prices of a number of its cloud services, soon after Google cut down its prices. According to the vice president of Amazon Web Services, cost slashing is aggressive in nature. Slashing prices is a regular process. Whenever it is possible to reduce costs, they lower the prices for the customers.As soon as Google announced to reduce its  Google Compute Engine (GCE) by 32 percent, Google Storage  by 68 percent Amazon Web Services decided to cut its price of AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3) by 51 percent, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) by 30 percent to 40 percent, AWS' Relational Database Service (RDS) by 28 percent, ElastiCache service  by 34 percent on average.The repeated cloud price cuts make it hard  to run in-house operations, which would create both hardware costs and preservation costs costly. Read more at:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247216/Price_war_Amazon_cuts_cloud_costs_to_counter_Google

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Three ways analytics can change customer service: (1)Barriers to the organizations are to be broken down as encouraged by Analytics: The multi-channel analytics is causing many brands to call their customer service technologies and processes frequently to break down data vaults and multi-channel support and reaction is centralized to avoid repetition of customer information. say of the customer, a 360-degree vision of the customer, makes analytics more convenient and insightful. (2) Changing awareness of chief Measurements by Analytics: Organizations are deviating from old methods such as rapidity to answer and quantity of calls handled per hour, and moving towards more important methods such as overall client pleasure, first call decision. (3) Allowance of analytics to   move ahead: Once the right analytical reports are collected organizations use them to improve their services and support. Using analytics an organizations can estimates what customers are wanting and expecting from their services. Read more at:

http://www.parature.com/customerservice-analytics/

Enhanced e-commerce is a trending reason nowadays for the uprising online retail shopping. It includes tracking code updates, data model changes, and new end-user reports that address many ecommerce-specific use cases. Together they help online retailers see farther and understand customer behaviors better than ever before. According to reports, online retail grew above 30% in year 2013. Digital data has played an essential role in that growth offering deep insights into online shopping behavior and letting retailers make smarter moves. But needs are rapidly increasing and retailers are requiring more sophisticated and comprehensive analysis tools to understand shoppers and improve product-level performance. We should analyze how far shoppers get in the shopping bag and understand which products are viewed most and which are frequently abandoned in cart. We should also create product lists for onsite merchandising rules, product landing pages to see which lists and products are best at driving customer engagement and analyze how internal promotions impact sales and act immediately on the results. Read more at: 

In the recent past, most companies have recognized the bottom-line impact to be gained through effective pricing. Tapping the full promise of pricing requires an infrastructure to drive real and sustained pricing performance. With such a foundation, a company can establish and strengthen pricing activities by creating deliberate decision processes, a specialized pricing organization, mechanisms that appropriately measure and reward pricing excellence, and vigorous support tools and systems.

A pricing infrastructure can be difficult and costly to create. It requires investing appropriately, empowering the right people, articulating clear targets and goals, and managing risk. Yet the benefits of realizing true pricing excellence are worthwhile: a one-percentage-point improvement in average price of goods and services leads to an 8.7 percent increase in operating profits for the typical Global 1200 company. 

Every company should have a set of pricing metrics that measure the financial and operational health of pricing across the business. These metrics may include simple data, such as the average selling price, discount, and margin for key products; operational data, including the number of pricing exceptions and win/loss percentages; and special measures to track the progress and impact of specific pricing initiatives. While the manager of a single product line may see metrics only for that, the general manager of a business unit sees those same metrics across the operation and can drill down to the level of individual products to understand the root causes of pricing performance.

Without uncovering and acting on the opportunities big data presents, many companies are leaving millions of dollars of profit on the table. The secret to increasing profit margins is to harness big data to find the best price at the product—not category—level, rather than drown in the numbers flood. To read more visit: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/using_big_data_to_make_better_pricing_decisions

The service sector constitutes 62% of the world’s total GDP. It has grown by leaps and bounds over the last two decades. The service sector employs around 40% of the global labour force. The four unique features of services are Intangibility, Inseparability, Perishability and Variability. Service operations are often labour intensive and susceptible to variations. These variations often lead to complexities and customer dissatisfaction. The big challenge is to deliver consistent quality of services across all platforms.  Demand Planning is another big challenge. Services are dynamic and perishable in nature and this can often lead to instances of idle capacity or opportunity loss. Further, the quality in service environment is an experience and not just a measurement against specification so defect definition can tricky. To overcome these challenges, as in other industries, the service industry needs to innovate and continuously improve its processes. Here are four suggested process improvement techniques for services industries:

• Develop a Process Manual

• Automate Processes

• Reduce Failure Demand

• Conduct a Service Blueprinting exercise

To know more about the four suggested process improvement techniques visit:

 http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/innovation/articles/four-key-process-improvement-techniques-for-servic/

The two important ways to redirect a user agent client-side are meta refresh and JavaScript redirect. Either method of client-side redirection has potential for causing significant issues with both analytics and SEO in spite of having flexibility in choosing whether or not to redirect after the page is rendered and portability in having code. Essentially there are two issues of client-side redirection with Analytics: 1) page view bloat 2) unclean referrer. The first issue occurs when the client-side redirect fires after the analytics code has already discovered the page view. The second issue, unclean referrer, refers that the final result has an unclear referrer. Regarding SEO, the problems are more extreme. There are at least two key issues: 1) page rank devaluation 2) content mismatch. The use of a meta in short explains that most crawlers support a meta refresh of 0 and treat it as a redirection of server-side, and a JavaScript redirect is simply ignored as crawlers don't read JavaScript.Read more at: 

http://thesimplesynthesis.com/post/effect-of-client-side-redirects-on-analytics-and-seo-meta-refresh-and-javascript

According to a survey, which polled more than 13000 customers across 33 countries and 10 industries, showed that contact centers undermine the importance of customer service and hence dissatisfy them. 91 percent of customers complain that they have to contact the company several times for the same problem. 90 percent do not like to be put on hold. 89 percent report being frustrated about having to repeat their problems several times. Companies should start providing best class customer service so that they do not have to face same pitfalls with customer retention every time. To avoid call waiting, a cloud router should be used for automatically transferring  call to the next agent. Companies should invest in real time reporting software so that they have full interaction history of a customer when they call. Read more at: at:http://www.callcentertimes.com/Articles/tabid/59/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/407/CategoryID/1/NewsID/783/Default.aspx 

Online chat is a better option compared to other customer service strategies like an email exchange or a personalized phone call. For live chat, some essential criteria have to be considered. First, it is important to ensure that the client or the user is registered on the company's website as all chat sessions would originate from the website of the company. Second, it is also important to know that whether inquiries being received are quick to answer or are detailed inquiries in order to continue with at least three chat sessions at a time. Third, the basic requirement is to have an operator during live chat sessions. Due to live chat sessions, a knowledge base of prepared responses gets build up which benefits in responding to customers faster and re-type the same answer, and thus there is a consistent communication between the company and customer. Read more at: http://managementhelp.org/blogs/customer-service/2010/06/04/customer-service-strategies-live-chat/ 

To boost manufacturing and entrepreneurship in the country, Flipkart (Indian e-commerce company)  announced its tie up with Small and Medium Enterprise (SMEs) promotion bodies. Strong data analytics that forms the base of e-marketplaces will help the sellers to improve their products easily and attract more customers. According to the Executive Director of NCDPD (National Center for Design and Product Development), analytics and market intelligence provided by Flipkart will assist NCDPD in improving their products and R&D and also enable the craftsmen to create better saleable products. The objective of this tie-up is to continue helping entrepreneurs to create products according to buyer requirements and grow significantly by expanding their business so that they may become manufacturers not only at a local but also at a national level. Read more at: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-06-18/news/50678912_1_data-analytics-flipkart-market-data.

 As India is growing, the e-waste being dumped from the West is leading to generation of more e-waste. India has seen a dramatic change in laws for handling e-waste in India.In 2010 Indian lawmakers passed an e-waste policy that included Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), before this there was an absence of e-waste recycling infrastructure to manage the country's wealth. EPR means that several business houses such as Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard will be required to take financial responsibility for recycling their products. The Indian EPR law involves electronic manufacturers join hands with Indian recyclers (including the informal sector) to set up collection centres. In India this is the first time that a law includes informal sector participation. This means that informal sector recyclers who establish a legally recognized association and/or cooperatives will have an opportunity to participate in collection, refurbishing and dismantling of e-waste. To know more about e-waste and EPR go to:

http://svtc.org/blog/e-waste/what-does-indias-e-waste-law-mean/

According to Tali Yahalom, consumers want to be treated indivually and not like any other consumer you deal with every day. Companies should realize that changing rules once in a while is less costly than losing a customer. Moreover, social mediums like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp have become extremely useful in tracking one's reputation online. One should be considerate towards a customer's emotional state of frustration and listen calmly to him/her instead of becoming defensive. Nowadays, companies have tools for collecting consumer feedbacks and suggestions which are extremely important. A company should be optimistic towards feedbacks and try and learn from it. To know more, follow this link: http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/12/the-new-rules-of-handling-customer-complaints.html

Enterprises hire  lots of people, but in a world where change happens fast and often, they can’t anticipate every need. One solution is to hire contractors for new or temporary projects. But that involves recruiters finding people—but they won’t already know the company’s systems and culture. A better way is to find someone in-house, but in a company with hundreds of employees, that can be difficult—unless you let big data do the heavy lifting.

Progressively, organizations are doing simply that: Big Data is helping them match positions to existing representatives' profiles. Organizations are utilizing HR programs that change the representative profile from ignored comfort into an effective instrument giving them a chance to discover abilities that don't match a specialist's set of expectations or even their delineation toward oneself. They work by scouring social-media profiles, forums, blogs and comments across the Internet, to unearth talent that’s under their own roof—but they just didn’t know it. For a detailed article on this topic visit: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/.