You are a Six Sigma practitioner working for a retail chain

You are a Six Sigma practitioner working for a retail chain that sells home furniture. The company has been losing market share recently, and it has been determined that this is due to poor customer satisfaction during the product ordering process. You have just been assigned a project to improve the process of quoting price and delivery for new dining room tables to retail customers.

a. What is the most probable primary metric (or key process output variable) for this process?

b. How would you begin to determine possible sources of waste in this process?

Solution

a. The most probable primary metric (key process output variable) for the process would be the number of new dining room tables dlivered to retail customers.

b. To determine the possible sources of waste in this process, the most important factor would be to study the need of the customers so as to improve the customer satisfaction by revising the quoting price, thus gaining market share.