When Six Sigma Comes to Your Company,

Will Your IT Organization Be Ready?

Six Sigma is a highly structured process for increasing profitability by improving the quality of products and services. Six Sigma’s benefits include reduced costs and increased profits, better customer retention, and improved efficiency. Six Sigma directly addresses several pain points con-fronting management today:

• competitive pressures for cost reduction and efficiencies

• resolution of quality issues that can erode profits, customer confidence, and time to market

• long–term value creation built upon quality and efficiency

General Electric, one of Six Sigma’s early adopt-ers, said in its annual report that it had saved a total of . billion (. of sales) to date by implementing Six Sigma. And Motorola, where the method was first developed, reported in that Six Sigma had enabled it to save billion over the previous years. Other compa-nies that have adopted successful corporate–wide Six Sigma programs include Kintana customers Sony, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, as well as industry giants Ford, Nokia, Canon, Lockheed Martin, American Express, DuPont, Dell, and Polaroid.

Six Sigma translates the customer’s desire for quality into specific steps that companies can take to meet those expectations. It enforces these qual-ity improvements by requiring rigorous statistical process analysis and measurement. Six Sigma seeks to improve processes through a five–step series of phase project, known as DMAIC: define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. DMAIC is used to bring existing processes up to Six Sigma quality levels.

A second Six Sigma project is known as DMADV: define, measure, analyze, design, and verify. DMADV is used for developing new pro-cesses or products, and may also be applied to processes needing more radical improvement through design and verification.

Table lists benefits achieved by early adopters of this discipline.

Kintana and Six SigmaFaster path to profitability

Table | What Six Sigma has Accomplished

increases in profit margins of up to per year

gains in market share of up to per year

up to improvement in cost/price margin

up to increased profitability, measured against firms that continue to operate at lower quality levels

- decrease in capital expenditures

reduced capital spending

more productive R&D spending

faster new–product development

increased customer satisfaction

increased quality, at reduced cost

reduced mistakes in all operations

- increased capacity

reduction in employee count

faster return on working capital

Six Sigma is anything but easy. It’s a daunting process, requiring that organizations embark upon a tightly structured, multi–step journey toward ensuring that each process produces no more than . defects per million opportunities. (A defect is defined as anything that might fall outside of a customer’s expectations).

at’s because Six Sigma forces IT to take clearly documented steps toward defining, measuring, analyzing, improving, and controlling its pro-cesses. And IT’s existing tools make implementing structure and control a complex, labor–intensive, and frustrating experience. Meanwhile, the costs of implementing and maintaining Six Sigma–level quality standards in IT all but wipe out the potential savings. What’s management to do?

Kintana Technology Chain Management:

Quality, Cost Savings, and Control

Kintana’s products were designed from the ground up to rapidly and easily improve the qual-ity of all IT operations—making Six Sigma imple-mentation by IT organizations a relatively easy and far less expensive process. By automating IT procedures that formerly required repetitive manual intervention by high–level staff, and by bringing structure, control, automation, and accu-racy to all IT functions, Kintana fully satisfies the Six Sigma demands for process definition, mea-surement, analysis, improvement, and control.

Many companies today complain about the poor alignment between their business strategies and their IT operations. eir IT staff ’s energies are consumed by the daily tasks of managing com-plex so ware and hardware. Forced to struggle with repetitive manual procedures, they simply don’t have the time to deploy new strategic systems as fast as business would like them. And, until now, IT hasn’t had a platform to imple-ment the kind of highly automated, structured, visible, and efficient processes that would permit it to respond more rapidly to the business side’s requirements, much less implement Six Sigma’s strict quality standards.

Kintana gives IT this platform. Technology Chain Management from Kintana gives IT the visibility, control, and automation it needs to operate at the speed of today’s business, at Six Sigma levels of quality.

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Table | The Cost of Quality

As Table shows, the cost of quality falls steadily as a company improves the efficiency and accuracy of its processes by advancing through the five steps toward Six Sigma. Unfortu-nately, though, when it comes to implementing Six Sigma in IT organizations, management encounters a troubling dilemma.

Six Sigma is a tough challenge for any organiza-tion, but for IT, it can seem close to impossible. In fact, it has been estimated that enterprises embarking on Six Sigma programs through will spend at least percent more on their IT applications and infrastructure than organiza-tions that do not (. probability).

Sigma (σ) Levels

Defects per Million Opportunities

, (noncompetitive companies)

,

, (industry average)

. (world class)

Cost of Quality

not applicable

- of sales

- of sales

- of sales

< of sales

Each sigma shift provides a net income improvement.

Souce | Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top CorporationsMikel Harry, Ph.D. and Richard Schroeder (Doubleday, ).

Kintana’s Revolutionary Solution for IT

Kintana’s Technology Chain Management (TCM) is a revolutionary new solution that completes an enterprise so ware suite by fully aligning IT to business objectives and by delivering technology solutions faster and at lower cost. TCM gives the CEO the “missing fourth wheel” to drive the entire business in real time.

TCM is to the CIO what CRM is to the SVP of Sales, what ERP is to the CFO, and what HRMS is to the VP of HR. ese enterprise applications pro-vide automated processes, collaboration between functions, and ° visibility and control to their respective business units. It is ironic that IT, the very group responsible for implementing these critical enterprise applications and integrating and automating the rest of the business, has never before had this kind of solution for its own benefit. Most IT organizations are still functioning in sepa-rate silos of expertise, are falling further behind in their ability to respond to business requirements, and are attempting to deal with increased com-plexity by throwing more expensive resources at the problem.

With technology rapidly becoming a core com-petency for every business, the absence of an enterprise solution for IT has held companies back, limited their competitiveness, and increased costs. Kintana now provides that solution—TCM—making it possible to run IT like the rest of the business, and to help run the entire business in real time.

From capturing upgrade/enhancement requests to automating code deployment, Kintana’s com-plete Technology Chain Management solution speeds the technology of business. Kintana prod-ucts include:

• Kintana DriveAn initiative management solution, Kintana Drive enables organizations to streamline and standardize the planning, tracking, and execution of initiatives.

• Kintana CreateAn enterprise request process management solution, Kintana Create allows companies to standardize all technology–based processes by automating and managing information aggregation, prioritization, and approval.

• Kintana DeliverA deployment management solution, Kintana Deliver enables IT to automate and manage the migration, staging and deployment of technologies.

• Kintana Dashboard° visibility and control over initiatives and oper-ational tasks. Visual displays and exception reports tailored to an individual’s role give an instant birds eye view and provide drill down for details.

• Kintana AcceleratorsComplementary to Kintana Create, Deliver, and Drive, the Kintana Accelerators provide built–in best practices and automation for specific applica-tion technologies such as ERP, CRM, and eCom-merce, commonly used by IT organizations.

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Kintana is Pure Java. All of Kintana’s products are based on industry standards for scalable Internet applications, with a powerful common repository (an Oracle database) from which extensive reports can be generated. Figure shows the portfolio.

Without Kintana’s integrated solution, highly paid IT staff find themselves spending large amounts of time on maintenance and marginal projects. Perhaps that’s why percent of all IT projects fail and percent are either over budget, completed late, or have sub–optimal functionality. Kintana so ware forces technology initiatives through an approval process that ensures conformance with corporate goals, including Six Sigma’s DMAIC projects, while greatly improving process quality:

• Kintana standardizes the way business goals and IT requests are logged, making it easy for everyone to speak the same language and enforc-ing the goals, while supporting the Six Sigma requirements of definition and measurement.

• e Kintana Dashboard provides real–time visibility, permitting immediate status checks and dynamic adjustments, and fulfilling the Six Sigma requirements for analysis and control.

• Kintana allows companies to categorize IT initia-tives as a function of the business goal they sup-port. is quickly weeds out projects that have lost alignment and permits rapid, easy reorder-ing of priorities as goals change. is capability supports the Six Sigma requirements of process definition, analysis, improvement, and control.

• Kintana solution spans the entire IT project life cycle—plan, build, deploy, and maintain—allow-ing the organization to use one solution at all levels (see next section). is saves time, and reduces complexity as well providing easy access to real time information needed for a successful six sigma implementation.

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Technology Chain Management by Kintana is simply the best way to bring the complexity of IT under control, for rapid implementation of Six Sigma initiatives. Kintana builds visibility, accu-racy, and speed into IT operations, meeting the stringent Six Sigma requirements for definition, measurement, analysis, improvement and control, while filling management’s need for predictable quality, cost reduction, improved profitability, and highly responsive alignment.

Figure | Kintana Product Portfolio

Drive

Create

Deliver

Dashboard

Oracle

SAP R/3

Siebel

PeopleSoft

Vignette

Oracle

BEA Weblogic

Database DB2

Database Sybase

Database SQL Server

Kintana Technology Foundation

Kintana Accelerators

application technology

Six Sigma’s Tiered Implementation

Process Improvement Through DMAIC

As mentioned earlier, Six Sigma seeks to improve processes through a five–phase project known as DMAIC: define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. When applied to key levels of organiza-tion, each step produces different, although com-plementary results. e success of Six Sigma is defined as the extent to which it transforms each level of an organization to improve the organi-zation’s overall quality and profitability. Table shows how DMAIC is used at different levels.

Kintana’s Tiered Approach to IT Implementation:

Indispensable Support for Six Sigma

Kintana’s Technology Chain Management solution ensures that any IT initiative is not only consistent with overall corporate initiatives, but it is also consistent and applicable at all dif-ferent levels of the organization. Kintana’s tiered approach to IT implementation breaks any such implementation into three distinct levels that match the organizational hierarchy implementa-tion needs. At the highest level, initiatives are approved by senior business and IT managers based on the organization’s corporate initiatives. Subsequently, projects are defined to fulfill the needs of different entities within the organiza-tion. Finally, processes and tasks required are identified to ensure the successful completion of the desired projects. Metrics at any lower level are also identified and linked back to higher levels to provide the real time visibility and control required at any level by the process/task, project, and the initiative owners.

is approach is consistent with the way Six Sigma is applied to the three key organization levels: business, operations, and process. Figure depicts such relationships.

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Table | Six Sigma Steps

LEVEL

define

measure

analyze

improve

control

business

define plans to realize improvement of each state

measure the business systems that support the plans

analyze the gaps in system performance benchmarks

improve system elements to achieve performance goals

control system level characteristics that are critical to value

operation

define Six Sigma projects to resolve operational issues

measure the performance of the Six Sigma projects

analyze project performance in relation to operational goals

improve Six Sigma project management system

contrl inputs to project management system

process

define the processes that contribute to the functional problems

measure the capability of each process that offers operational leverage

analyze the data to assess prevalent patterns and trends

improve the key product/service characteristics cre-ated by the key processes

control the process variables that exert undue influence

Figure | Kintana’s Tiered Approach to IT Implementation

organization

corporate

division

process

initiative

project

process

business

operation

process

Kintana Six Sigma

Kintana’s tiered approach to IT implementation supports Six Sigma’s application to the organization at key levels.

IT’s Contribution to DMAIC Results

As we mentioned earlier, Six Sigma poses a daunting challenge for all of a company’s divi-sions, but for IT in particular, implementing Six Sigma and achieving the desired DMAIC results without a clear model can seem next to impos-sible. For this reason, it is crucial for the IT

organization to pursue the following steps:

• clearly understand the DMAIC requirements and the expected results as they relate to IT

• identify and map the existing IT processes that can contribute to the desired results

• identify the missing and inappropriate existing IT processes that do not meet the DMAIC requirements

• create a process improvement plan to achieve the desired results

• identify appropriate tools and technologies needed to achieve the results within the constraints of the IT organization

• implement new solutions and processes

Table , in the previous section, outlines the DMAIC requirements for the three key levels. What follows is a model that covers the func-tionality and processes within an IT organization. At the highest level, the IT functions consist of:

• strategy and planningtying business drivers to IT strategies

• customer service managementrequest management; balancing request loads with available resources; IT/Business collaboration

• deliveryrelease management; change control; projects; solution deployment

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• program management & coordinationmultiple project coordination and management

• governance/administrationhigh level visibility and status into all projects—provides administrative capabilities such as performance reporting; quality management; legal; finance; etc.

Figure shows a general model of IT functions and subfunctions. ese activities are conducted differently by different organizations, but most large IT organizations perform most or all of these functions in some way. And TCM from Kin-tana can be configured to support most of these functions.

Kintana’s Technology Chain Management assists any IT organization involved in a Six Sigma implementation by:

• providing a solution that ties all of an organization’s business initiatives—including Six Sigma—to the IT strategies that are required to support them.

• providing detailed, clear guidelines and metrics for each step of each IT process, from planning to delivery and program management, including high–level administration functions

• encompassing the requirements for any success-ful IT implementation, while also providing real–world guidelines for charting IT’s contribution to a successful Six Sigma implementation

• providing the IT organization with the tools and the means to meet new requirements by:

– modifying existing processes

– creating new processes

– automatically managing all changes

– providing metrics & visibility at any stage

Without Kintana’s TCM, IT’s job would be much harder, and a company’s Six Sigma champion—whether the CEO, or any other C–level executive who champions the effort—will lack the visibility and control required to manage the Six Sigma process.

How Kintana Improves Critical–to–Quality

Processes as Required by Six Sigma

In Six Sigma, the primary aim is to identify core processes—the processes of an organization that add value to the final product or service delivered to the customer. e next step is to identify the measurable and actionable key characteristics of these processes that directly impact the perceived quality of the process, product, or service. Such key characteristics are called Critical–to–Quality characteristics, or CTQs.

Figure shows how Kintana fully integrates IT processes, from planning through deployment and maintenance, while simultaneously improv-ing the Critical-to-Quality processes in IT.

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Figure | A General Model of IT Functions and Subfunctions

strategy& planning

business

IT

portfoliomanagement

demand/supplybalancing

customer relationsmanagement

delivery

Kintana enables successful implementation of Six Sigma and DMAIC initiatives. The chart shows examples of Kintana functionality that relates to IT processes.

legal &compliance

facilities& assets

communica-tions

performance reporting

qualitymanagement

financehuman

performancevendor/contract management

governance / administration

directprogram

execute mgmt.processes

analyze program perfomance

plan & implement prog. improv.

operate program mgmt office

authorize build and test

operate teamwork environment

program management & coordination

customer servicemanagement

production management

release management

projects

enhancements

problems

changecontrol

solutiondeployment

Figure | Kintana Streamlines Processes

Kintana streamlines processes and provides summary and detail reports in real time.

process description

improved processes using Kintana

results before Kintana results after Kintana

Kintana repository

initiative management using Kintana Dashboard exception reports

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Figure | Reduction in Time to Revenue:

Kintana streamlines processes and provides necessary metrics required for successful implementation. A new system configuration and set up process has been shown before and after Kintana implementation.

process description

process detail with Kintana

results before Kintana results after Kintana

process detail without Kintana

automated manual tasks and standardized repeatable processes

automated deployment of changes

logged and tracked status and identified bottlenecks

reduced the setup time to 4 hours

reduction in time to revenue: 97%

new systemconfiguration

and setup

it took an average of 120 hours to setup a new customer and configure

a new server with a PeopleSoft application

Kintana Client Case Study

Figure shows a specific example where Kintana reduces time–to–revenue for a new customer server setup by automating and structuring the related IT procedures. e chart provides before–and–a er metrics for an actual Kintana implementation. is example demonstrates how a customer used Kintana’s Technology Chain Man-agement solution to streamline a process. During a Six Sigma implementation of a similar process Kintana can significantly improve CTQs at the pro-cess level. Based on an actual case study, the chart shows how Kintana helped a customer achieve improvements in the following key CTQ areas.

• SpeedReduces average setup time from hours to hours

• AccuracyAutomates manual tasks and standardizes repeatable processes, reducing the risk of time consuming errors and rework

• ReliabilityAutomates deployment of technology changes, making implementation faster and more reliable

• EfficiencyStandardizes project approach, allowing management to design, implement and enforce the use of the fastest, most efficient processes

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From Information Week’s Innovation column, September , : “Before the implementation of Kintana’s novel type of system automation, it took this ASP customer’s engineers hours to install and configure PeopleSo applications for a single customer. Now it takes four hours—with little or no human intervention…. Further, this Kintana client also cut testing requirements both in terms of staffing and the number of quality–assurance tests required. e testing phase has been cut from five steps to one…. ‘We were in an endless chain of hiring more personnel to con-duct tests,’ says the VP of Client Services. ‘ at’s now a thing of the past, and those personnel dol-lars can be applied elsewhere in the company.’”

Kintana Client Case Study

Figure shows how Kintana helped a manu-facturing client achieve efficiencies in the data-base refreshes, a common process that becomes increasingly frequent near go-live time for new deployments. Automating database refreshes reduced staff time for that process by , and eliminated a serious bottleneck that impeded projects at critical periods.

• SpeedKintana frees IT personnel from repetitive tasks through automation, allowing them to focus on their core skills

• Knowledge TransferKintana facilitates knowledge transfer by docu-menting best practices and reusable solutions

• ProductivityKintana allows new people to focus on Kintana as the main interface for project management, reducing training time and allowing them to become productive quickly.

• Elimination of DependenciesKintana reduces dependence on experienced individuals, by institutionalizing business processes

Figure | A Bottleneck Eliminated

process description results without Kintana results with Kintana

average of 2 DBA hoursper refresh

created a bottleneck

database or test environment refreshes and

website updates

IT staff involvement is reduced to less than 5 minutes.

Kintana automates this process by allowing requesters to initiate these request types themselves and have Kintana automatically

execute the changes.

staff time for one common process reduced 96%

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is company is a diversified industrial manu-facturer with a large presence in the automotive sector. is company told InfoWorld that Kintana’s capabilities allowed the company to rapidly reduce staff time by for this partic-ular process, while simultaneously reducing the time it took to make hundreds of code changes in approximately Oracle environments. InfoWorld said, “ e average enterprise code change now takes one day instead of seven days, and an emergency code change now takes four hours instead of hours.”

Kintana’s Key Values

e foregoing case studies clearly illustrate Kintana’s key values:

• Kintana reduces time to market, by eliminating bottlenecks and delays

• Kintana lowers staffing costs, by leveraging and retaining scarce IT personnel

• Kintana improves IT productivity,by enforcing consistent processes

• Kintana reduces risk,by automating error-prone tasks

• Kintana aligns IT with business strategies,by enabling IT to react quickly and efficiently, and by giving business leaders complete visibility and control over IT processes

Table summarizes the strong commonality of benefits between the Six Sigma process and Kintana’s products. ( e metrics cited are from a study and a survey of Kintana’s clients conducted by a major international consulting firm.)

Table | Comparative Benefit Analysis

increased profitability

reduced costs

faster working capital returns and lowered capital spending

reduced employee cost

improved prices

improved market share

improved quality

elimination of defects/mistakes

streamlining operations

reduced deployment risks

process re–creation

faster new product delivery

Kintana reduces costs and streamlines operations, leading to increased profitability

overall reduction of IT (-) and business costs, through alignment of initiatives and streamlining of operations, is achievable

Kintana frees up IT resources for strategic tasks and improves R&D productivity resulting in lowered capital spending

majority of surveyed Kintana customers report IT staffing cost savings

Kintana improves quality and decreases time–to–market, enabling rapid market entry and establishment of market leadership—this results in improved prices

of surveyed Kintana customers report that Kintana solutions help them improve their product deliveries and new product introductions

by automating repetitive tasks and providing real–time visibility into the status or projects, Kintana reduces errors and defects and improves quality

Kintana Workflow automates repetitive tasks and eliminates error–prone processes

of surveyed Kintana customers report improved IT productivity

of surveyed Kintana customers strongly agree that Kintana helps them reduce deployment risks

Kintana Create offers a visual workflow that can easily track and re–create processes

- improvement reported by surveyed customers

Six Sigma Kintana solution (sample clients)

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Summary

Six Sigma’s stringent demands can force compa-nies to increase their IT budgets by up to . Organizations considering Six Sigma would do well to consider these increased infrastructure costs when estimating ROI on their Six Sigma programs. With full implementation, Kintana’s clients can expect to save - in their overall IT costs, so implementing Six Sigma with Kintana can offset the additional Six Sigma IT

costs. Meanwhile, the ROI from implementing Six Sigma can be huge. And Kintana’s cost–slashing features continue to deliver enhanced profitabil-ity, year a er year.

Kintana lowers the cost of Six Sigma compliance by automating IT processes, accelerating IT

throughput, reducing staffing requirements, and enforcing the quality standards that turn the Six Sigma dream of enhanced profits into a reality. Kintana is the only end–to–end solution for fast, efficient Six Sigma implementation by IT.

Kintana has been rigorously tested by over companies. For companies seriously considering moving toward Six Sigma quality and profitabil-ity, Kintana is a requirement and an aid to Six Sigma compliance.

www.kintana.com | 1-877-KINTANA