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7) Knowledge Management and Six Sigma Exploring the Potential of Two Powerful Disciplines, Paige Leavitt1) Six Sigma should not be viewed as a quality program that is commissioned to reduce defects but as a methodology that helps companies better meet the needs of their business. KM shares this goal.2) Voice of the client in the DFSS process is also a potential area for a collaboration of ideas. In Design For Six Sigma, acquaintance of the customer-centric requirements is a key stimulant to the design process, said ODell. And if you could use knowledge management tools to better understand what the customer is saying to sales people and service people, that learning comes ass to the folks who can make a difference in the design process.3) APQCs Lessons Learned The problems, issues, and opportunities in organizations are not active reducing defects they are about responding to new opportunities, using the voice of the customer knowledge, said ODell. With both Six Sigma and KM, Im telling you that youre going to get more of what you trust - if you begin to open the conversation to a different way of thinking about solving some of these problems over the long term. Because both Six Sigma and KM have tremendous power, they also have some issues that they need help with.Professionals in both arenas can have from each other. Six Sigma can learn from KM how to recognize knowledge, as well as processes. Joseph Hofer-Alfeis from Siemens said, Six Sigma is oriented to the quality of products and processes. If you think of a knowledge-intensive business, Six Sigma for knowledge quality -- the quality of the proficiency, the quality of knowledge flows, and the quality of description knowledge -- should also be a ... ...nage the targeted process (e.g., an insurancesales agent or supervisor), while otherswork to support the process(e.g., an information technology expertwho provides support to theinsurance claimsprocess).Unique project teamsare put together foreach of the projects, and disbanded after these projects arecompleted, handing off resulting improvement-actions to processownerspeople who routinely operate the processes.5) Although each project has different objectives and specific toolsemployed, overall these projects follow a standardized, structuredfive-phase project management approach known as DMAIC forDefine, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control phases (Schroederet al., 2008).6) redact leaders are trained in the use of practices forcollecting, combining, and synthesizing the knowledge of teammembers for use in process improvements (Hoerl, 2001).