초록
In these days, most of Korean industries advocates and utilizes Six Sigma as an integrated innovation tool for all their business and manufacturing processes. Six Sigma is known to bring more financial and managerial achievements than other innovation methods and tools. However, such successes are not always guaranteed. To adopt and implement Six Sigma successfully, it is necessary to grasp and understand essential characteristics of Six Sigma and then identify suitable elements and complements in consideration of vision, strategies, capability, circumstance and environment of the company. Step by step implementation plan may be built based on those ingredients. This study is to find out key ingredients (KIs) of Six Sigma. Potential ingredients selected from previous studies of success factors and ingredients of Six Sigma and TQM, and criteria of quality awards like MBNQA, EFQM, Deming prize and Korean National Quality Awards (KNQA) are classified into 11 categories based on experts' opinion and affinity analysis: management leadership, belt system, training, six sigma system, compensation, organization, corporate culture, customer focused, project selection, management of project results, and managerial achievements. Irrelevant or ineffective potential ingredients are discarded using factor analysis for the questionnaires answered by champions, MBB's and BB's of 90 Korean companies that have more than 3 years experience of Six Sigma. Also from the factor analysis, 3 factors are derived for each categories respectively except the managerial achievement category. Those 11 categories and 30 factors are defined as KIs of Six Sigma. This study also reveals that there is difference according to enterprise size, type of business, and implementation time in terms of KI's, and prioritizes KI's that an enterprise to pursue Six Sigma successfully should consider according to its characteristics.
