This is the fourth article in our "AI with Purpose" series.
Elevating Your Business: How AI Unlocks Six Sigma for SME Growth
We've established how Generative AI can save you time at an individual level and how Agentic AI, powered by clean data, can automate your tasks. Now, it's time to elevate that purposeful efficiency from the personal to the professional. This article shows how the foundational gains built at the individual and team levels, when supercharged by AI, make it feasible for even small and medium businesses to leverage a powerful framework like Six Sigma.
Demystifying Six Sigma for SMEs
Six Sigma is often seen as a complex methodology reserved for manufacturing giants. In reality, its core idea is simple: reduce variation and defects to improve quality, cost, and speed. It's a structured approach to solving problems that exist in every business, from customer service to logistics to marketing. For SMEs, it's a powerful way to move from being reactive to proactive, ensuring processes are consistent and reliable.
The framework is a five-step cycle known as DMAIC:
- Define the problem.
- Measure the current performance.
- Analyse the data to find root causes.
- Improve the process.
- Control the new process to sustain the gains.
Supercharging DMAIC with AI
Historically, this process was time-consuming and manual. Today, AI can enhance every single phase, making it faster and more accessible for SMEs.
- Define: Many times, we rush to a solution without clearly articulating the problem. AI can help here. For instance, Generative AI tools can analyse large amounts of customer feedback or support tickets to help you identify and clearly articulate the root cause of a problem, giving you a strong project foundation.
- Measure: Defining success metrics can be a challenge. We can consult Generative AI to suggest different ways to create relevant metrics for your specific context. Once metrics are defined, Agentic AI systems can automatically collect and organise data from various sources (e.g., sales data, customer feedback, operational metrics), providing real-time performance tracking.
- Analyse: This is one of AI's greatest strengths. Generative AI and other tools are excellent at analysing large amounts of data to identify patterns, anomalies, and hidden correlations that would take humans weeks to find.
- Improve: Once you have a clear analysis, AI can assist in the solution. Generative AI can provide recommendations for improvements. You can even use AI to simulate solutions to test different hypotheses without spending money on a real-world trial.
- Control: Lastly, AI can help you sustain your gains. You can leverage AI to monitor processes and get alerts when they deviate from the ideal. You can then implement these solutions with Agentic AI to automatically correct minor deviations, ensuring your processes remain optimised.
Your First Step: A Practical Example
Think about a common challenge for SMEs: reducing customer service response times.
- Define: Use AI to analyse customer service chats and social media comments to define the specific pain points causing delays.
- Measure: An Agentic AI system automatically tracks and logs response times for your team.
- Analyse: An AI tool analyses the logs to identify patterns—for example, a particular time of day or type of query that causes delays.
- Improve: AI recommends solutions, like a new template or an automated response system for specific queries.
- Control: An Agentic AI system continuously monitors response times, alerting you if they start to rise again.
This approach demonstrates how AI makes Six Sigma actionable for SMEs. It's not about being a giant corporation; it's about being smart and purposeful with your resources.
Tip: You can use AI to help you create a DMAIC Project Charter!
What's a common problem in your business that you think would be a great candidate for a Six Sigma project? Share your thoughts below!