Behind the world’s largest Six Sigma deployment : a DuPont case study

Introduction

Founded in 1802, DuPont puts science to work by creating sustainable solutions essential to a better, safer, healthier life for people everywhere. Operating in more than 70 countries, DuPont offers a wide range of innovative products and services for agriculture, nutrition, electronics, communications, safety and protection, home and construction, transportation and apparel industries.

In the late 1990’s DuPont embarked upon its Six Sigma journey as part of a broader corporate transformation strategy aimed at re-inventing itself to compete in an increasingly knowledge-driven economy. By 2006, the Six Sigma program generated several billion dollars in savings and top-line growth under the leadership of Corporate Champion, Don Linsenmann.

However, DuPont had outgrown the systems and processes used to track and report on program activities and financial benefits. The company needed a centralized, highly scalable, web-based solution to consolidate the records of thousands of past and active continuous-improvement projects. DuPont chose EnterpriseTrack^TM from Instantis.

The system, internally referred to as DSSET (DuPont Six Sigma EnterpriseTrack) went 'live' in December 2006 and is now entrusted to manage the activities and records for over 28,000 projects and 23,000 project team members and stakeholders. As a result, the EnterpriseTrack^TM deployment at DuPont is widely considered one of the largest project portfolio management deployments in the world.

Business Goals and Drivers

As outlined in The Six Sigma Field Book by Mikel Harry and Don Linsenmann, the program grew very quickly as aggressive goals were created and even exceeded. As the program expanded from business unit to business unit, initially each organization relied on its own Lotus Notes server to manage and track project results. By 2006, program information became scattered and replicated across 75 different servers. This led to data integrity issues and the inability to reliably roll-up information across organizational and geographic boundaries for enterprise-wide reporting and program management purposes. It created business by business individuation rather than standardization.

"DuPont’s challenge was to implement a single system so that we could have a single version of truth for all of our projected-related information," said Don Linsenmann. "A single, trusted corporate view of project impact roll-ups implies a single language, architecture, system and set of operational definitions. All 60,000 employees, 5 major business platforms and 23 SBUs, all regions and all business functions are in play," added Linsenmann.

A single system approach would also provide a significant opportunity to improve Green and Black Belt productivity by enabling search and project leverage across all businesses. This, in turn, enables Master Black Belts and Champions to jump start project activity within their businesses.

Solution Requirements

DuPont’s key requirements to enhance their project tracking and reporting capabilities were:

• Globally accessible web-based system
• “Off the shelf” software with minimal customization
• Flexible user-defined executive dashboard views
• Scalable knowledgebase and project document repository
• Minimal IT resources required to manage system

Solution

The DuPont solution includes the following Instantis EnterpriseTrack software modules and integrations:

• Idea Manager and Proposal Manager to gather ideas and formalize project selection criteria.
• Project Manager to standardize project management workflow and reporting.
• Financials Manager to standardize workflow for entering, validating and signing off on reported benefits.
• Knowledge Manager to share project templates, results and best practices globally.
• Reports Manager & Dashboards to provide customized, accurate, timely and flexible benefits reporting.
• Enterprise Identity System was integrated with the system to manage the access needs of a diverse population of users

Results and Next Steps

DuPont has joined the ranks of GE, Motorola and Allied Signal as one of the most iconic and successful Six Sigma –driven business excellence and process improvement success stories.

The program has been credited with generating over $3 billion in financial benefits (based on the completion of over 10,000 projects with an average benefit of roughly $300,000) and catalyzing a cultural transformation that was necessary for the company to re-invent itself and compete in the 21st century as a science-based solution company.

Instantis EnterpriseTrack is a core technology underpinning the 'single version of truth' for this unfolding story. DuPont credits EnterpriseTrack with bringing together all of its Six Sigma data into a single repository for productivity improvements and significantly enhanced opportunities for leverage. Data mining is beginning to put information at the fingertips of Champions and Master Black Belts as they guide the selection and implementation of the most beneficial projects for their respective organizations.

Moving forward, DuPont is contemplating expanding the use of the system to manage other strategic project portfolios in the IT as well as operational areas.

Company Profile