Six Sigma Work
Maryrose has executed Six Sigma projects in both the Seagate and Best Buy environments. Click here to view her Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certificate. Following is list of some of her Six Sigma projects with a brief description of the effort.
Ask to see scrubbed and sanitized (for client anonymity and protect confidential client info) collateral from Maryrose’s completed Six Sigma efforts.
Change Management
The problem perceived was the instability of bestbuy.com due to lack of process in implementing changes. This has caused chaos numerous times especially during holiday season (which happen to be high activity periods combined with low resource availability). This issue had drawn a lot of executive attention because of an escalation incident. The business case was created for an impact of $2Million/year and the metric that was going to be moved was number of outages caused by changes not implemented using the new process.
Maryrose identified all the stakeholders, worked with them to define the problem, identified a project objective and performed all required documentation and analysis to establish the baseline, negotiated a solution and managed the execution.
Store Location Information
This problem was a long-standing issue with Site Management. The only reason it was not getting any priority in fixing was because the negative impact was being mitigated by a resource in the Site Management team via manual intervention. The business case identified for this problem was $40 Million and the solution on the table was $1 Million.
Maryrose performed analysis to identify the problem, recruited the stakeholders to pipe in, articulated the problem and created the documentation, presented the solution options and cost benefit analysis and turned it over to the program executors.
Best Buy Remix
This project was conceived to allow bestbuy.com to achieve some degree of ubiquity in cyberspace. The goal was to create web services that can be invoked by Best Buy online patrons to potentially resell Best Buy merchandise on their own store fronts.
As program manager for this effort, Maryrose provided direction for the scope and limitations of the effort, wrote the business case and preliminary objective for the effort. Execution was then turned over to another team.
Seagate Technology
Portfolio Management
At Seagate Sales & Marketing IT, there was no accountability for delivery of the promised program benefits after completion of a project. Because of this, customers did not pay much attention to the business case for programs. For them, it was not real and tangible. The situation also made it hard to rally for a project for which there was no impassioned customer champion.
What Maryrose ended up doing was tying the process of measuring and recording the result to creating a measurable business case at the inception of the project. She influenced changing the portfolio prioritization process so that this business case was documented and captured at that time for re-evaluation when the project is completed and closed.
Returns pricing
Pricing at Seagate has always been volatile due to the nature of the product. It varies depending on location, market, product age. Records of pricing at point of sale are not kept. This causes issues for returns. Pricing is recalculated at return time using an algorithm that does not yield consistent results. This whole issue was causing a backlog of pricing issues, and resulting issues for Accounts Payable.
Maryrose undertook the Six Sigma project that took this issue on. FIrst in the pipeline was identifying the process owner, which was the biggest gap. After the process owner was identified, it was only a matter of selecting the appropriate solution using the applicable metric.
Maryrose resolved this issue in the prescribed period, using the appropriate tools correctly and garnered the ‘Best Project’ award during training.