oger Cliffe is the Quality Director at Vodafone. Here he talks to improvementandinnovation.com about his role in launching and supporting Six Sigma in the emerging markets within the EMAPA regions for the Vodafone Group.

Roger Cliffe

Roger joined Vodafone in 2002. His previous work in Quality Improvement covers the financial services, steel, aerospace and chemical industries in the USA, Japan and Europe. He is a frequent speaker at international Quality Conferences. He is a fellow of the IQA, has been a Senior Assessor for the European and British Quality Awards for 10 years and a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He is also a member of the Board of the British Quality Foundation and Midlands Excellence.

He is a keen long distance cyclist, has a wife, three children and a classic car and now lives in Solihull.

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IMPROVEMENTANDINNOVATION.COM: What does Six Sigma mean to Vodafone?

Roger Cliffe: Six Sigma is the internal brand which we use for all of our business improvement activities. It contains the standard Six Sigma methodology, structure, governance, disciplines, and competencies, but we also use elements of Lean, Kaizen, Process Improvement and Process Management.

As an organisation, we have been doing Six Sigma now for about 2 and a half years, UK Wide. These business and process improvement methods are being extended across the entire company.

What led you to Six Sigma?

We thought long and hard about the style and the approach to business improvement as well as how we would brand it, and how we would govern it. We did some pilot work using some Black Belts; not a full programme, but some projects using the Six Sigma methodology were introduced into one of our Business Units. Six Sigma was attractive to us because it enabled us to hit the key parts of the process with laser sharp attention and we produced some real and actual results.

Things that matter to an organisation such as Vodafone are how to get tangible, pragmatic results that really have a bearing on the way the business operates. The organisation has little patience for long term culture change initiatives that don’t really yield any benefits to the bottom line. Of course, we have had a cultural change as a result of Six Sigma but the main reason for adopting it is simply that it is a better way of doing business improvement than we had ever been able to do before. That’s the main driver – the fact that its tangible, focused and disciplined which is what Vodafone really needed.

"Six Sigma... is a better way of doing business improvement than we had ever been able to do before"

Given that there hasn’t been this kind of initiative before at Vodafone, what challenges have you faced in implementing Six Sigma?

The reason that there hasn’t been anything like this before is that Vodafone as an organisation has been changing and evolving so rapidly, with new products, new services, whole new technologies put in place in a relatively short space of time. The pace of change is phenomenal. So in the organisation there have been reservations about putting anything in that might slow that development cycle and process. In reality, doing Six Sigma properly will actually improve your time to market, so it’s the type of approach which we thought would best match our organisation.

Vodafone has historically harvested a relatively immature process environment, in comparison to other large manufacturing companies. We have ISO 9000: 2000 and initiatives to meet those requirements, but we hadn’t really got a systematic method for improving our business. Process improvement was previously unstructured, but now Six Sigma has added that structure, and it really has given us some spectacular results over the last 2 years. We are getting financial benefits of over half a million per Black Belt project, so we are getting some really spectacular savings. As a result, we are looking now at building up the number of Black Belts to 80, with 350 to 400 Green Belts.

We target five projects in two years per Black Belt. The first project a Black Belt does is called a nursery project, and is always a single project. Thereafter black belts are allowed to do more than one project at a time. They also supervise GB projects and they run WOW (War on Waste) workshops, which are our version of GE Workout processes.