Six-Sigma Survey Projects

One of the factors that distinguishes Six Sigma from TQM (Total Quality Management) and earlier quality movements is its reliance on measurable data.  Jiju Antony, in "Pros and cons of Six Sigma: an academic perspective", describes this difference like this:

Six Sigma emphasises the importance of decision making based on facts and data rather than assumptions and hunches. Six Sigma forces people to put measurements in place. Measurement must be considered as a part of the culture change.

Surveys are a key tool for transforming hypotheses and hunches about customer attitudes and outlooks into numbers and metrics. As a result, surveys are useful throughout Six Sigma work.

• Early in its own deployment of Six Sigma, Caterpillar conducted a Six Sigma Supplier Survey with its partners to understand how they had deployed Six Sigma and what lessons they had learned (see Lean Six Sigma: Combining Six Sigma Quality with Lean Production Speed by Michael George).
• When General Electric began its own use of Six Sigma, each GE division conducted detailed customer  surveys, asking customers to rate GE products and services on CTQ (Critical To Quality) issues and to rate best-in-class performance. This evolved into a quarterly customer-satisfaction process for many divisions, with low-scoring items in the quarterly updates becoming candidates for subsequent Six Sigma projects (see Managing Six Sigma: A Practical Guide to Understanding, Assessing, and Implementing the Strategy That Yields Bottom-Line Success by Forrest Breyfogle III, James Cupello and Becki Meadow).
• Voice-of-the-Customer research is often conducted as an input to QFD (Quality Function Deployment), with QFD transforming customer needs into engineering and quality assurance methods for developing new, high-quality products and services.
• One Six Sigma approach to web design involves an ongoing study of web-site effectiveness, which surveys visitors about their goals at the site and tracks the success rate of achieving those goals over time.  Regular incremental improvements to the web site are evaluated by their effect on improving goal completion rates.
• Another organization uses an employee survey to identify bottlenecks and excessive bureaucracy that reduce employee productivity, to highlight and prioritize areas for internal process improvement.
• The book Managing Six Sigma is noteworthy among Six Sigma books because it actually practices what it preaches and includes within itself a readership satisfaction survey! The authors assert the results of this survey will help them prepare the next edition of the book.

How have you used surveys in your Six Sigma projects?