A Survey on the Six Sigma implementation in the Iranian service Organizations

Six sigma is now increasingly applied to a variety of processes ranging from manufacturing to service and variegated transactional processes. The paper begins with a simple comparative study between manufacturing and service processes from the Six Sigma application perspective. Six sigma has been proved to be a rigorous pursuit of the reduction of process variation and defect rate in all critical business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in process performance that generates significant savings to the bottom line of an organization. The paper then presents the results of an exploratory survey carried out in the Iran service organizations to understand the most common status of Six Sigma. Results reveal that the most and the least common non-statistical and statistical tools and techniques employed by the Iranian survey companies are brainstorming and root cause analysis. Also, the paper finally reports the ranking of critical success factors of six sigma from the respondents „view, which are required for the successful deployment of Six Sigma in the Iranian service sector.