Given the wide range of options for becoming certified, it is somewhat surprising to observe the extent to which these varied certification programs are standardized in terms of both duration and content. For example, the standard for Black Belt training is a four-month program during which students receive one week of formal in-class training each month and use the time between training sessions to work on a Black Belt project. 8.10.3 The Need to Customize Six Sigma Programs Although there is a fair amount of consensus related to the roles, body of knowledge, and training practices surrounding Six Sigma programs, organizations that have succeeded with their Six Sigma programs also recognize the need to tailor their Six Sigma approach to their unique needs. Scottish Power, an electric and gas provider to more than 5 million customers in the United States and United Kingdom, serves as an excellent example of this. In May 2001, Scottish Power brought in an external consultant to begin training its first wave of 20 full-time Black Belts. Because of the limited data that were available and the relatively generic nature of the external consultant's training program, ScottishPower emphasized the use of the more simple tools in its early Six Sigma projects, including process mapping, Pareto analysis, cause-and-effect diagrams, and stakeholder analysis. Six months after the first wave of Black Belt training, a second group of 20 employees was selected for full-time Black Belt training. Based on their experience from the first round, Scottish Power identified the need to better use statistical analysis to identify the root causes of problems. Thus, the second wave of training, which was performed by Scottish Power's own Black Belts who had been trained in the first wave, emphasized statistical techniques such as the use of t-tests, ANOVA, correlation, regression, and DOE. Based on a desire to gain additional value from the data that were being collected, Scottish Power began emphasizing additional techniques in subsequent waves, including chi-square tests, nonparametric tests such as Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis and Box-Cox transformations. Scottish Power's experience and success with Six Sigma highlights the importance of customizing a Six Sigma program to the organization's unique needs and adopting the training as the organization becomes more sophisticated in its ability to both collect and analyze data. EXPAND YOUR UNDERSTANDING 1. Contrast Six Sigma and BPD. 2. Is there any relationship between DPMO and process capability? 3. Measurement systems analysis focuses primarily on the variation introduced into the measurement system by human operators. Can you think of other sources of variation introduced by the measurement system beyond the human operators? 4. Is the DMAIC approach more applicable to projects focusing on incremental change or radical change? Why? 5. Are there any limitations you see associated with QFD? Benchmarking? 6. What phase of DMAIC do you imagine is the most important phase? What phase do you imagine takes the longest? 7. Suppose that a restaurant's requirements for the "4-ounce" hamburger patties that it purchased from its supplier should be between 3-4 and 4.6 ounces. Why would the restaurant be concerned about hamburgers weighing too much?