How to find great six sigma training

For those of who are unfamiliar with the term Six Sigma let's take a minute to find out what it is. Six Sigma is a method or a set of techniques and in the business world it has become a movement that is focused on business process improvement. Six Sigma is a quality measurement and improvement program that is designed to focus on improving the capability of a company's business processes.

Difficulty rating: Moderate to difficult

Step one:
The first thing that you are going to need to do before you can even look for great six sigma training is to find out if six sigma is right for your company. In order to determine if your company will benefit from six sigma you need to look for some of the following characteristics:
- Quality focus and objectives are not clearly defined or communicated
- Upper management thinks that quality has nothing to do with business and profitability
- Levels and trends to track operations performance are not in place. Some of these measurements are: cost of poor quality, design effectiveness, inventory levels, etc
- Because there are no measurements or there are very few measurements all of the decisions are made by upper management with no other input
- Upper management is busy trying to look busy and bugging employees rather than getting stuff accomplished
- Employees so not like management and are afraid of them, feel like nobody cares about the employees

Step two:
Now that you have determined that six sigma will benefit your company you are going to need to begin to look for six sigma training.

Step three:
The first place that you should look is at other businesses in your industry. You can approach the upper management to see if they have adopted six sigma and if they have you can find out where they went for training and if they would recommend the same trainer for your company.

Step four:
You can also look at various consulting firms that provide six sigma training. In looking at the consulting firms the first thing that you are going to need to do is to locate the consulting firms and then interview them to find one that you think is going to be perfect for your company.

Step five:
One of the best places to go to find six sigma consulting services is online. You can go to any search engine and type in the words six sigma training and you will be directed to numerous websites that offer six sigma training. You can also look in the yellow pages to see if you can find any consulting firms in there.

Step six:
Once you have found a few consulting firms that you think are good you are going to want to start the process of finding out which firms are better than the others. To do this you are going to need to interview the people who provide the training to see what they are capable of, you are going to want to check out the reputation of the six sigma consulting firm with other businesses and you are going to want to check their references that they can provide you with. If they can't or won't provide you with references then you might want to go somewhere else.

Other tips or resources:
- One of the best places to go online to find out any information you need to know about six sigma is www.isixsigma.com This website provides you with all sorts of information about six sigma including training sessions and consultants that you can use