Establishing a Transactional Six Sigma Body of Knowledge

Six Sigma has transcended traditional manufacturing and is now becoming increasingly popular in transactional, service and administrative processes. Industries such as healthcare, financial services, hospitality, information technology, insurance and even government are beginning to utilize Six Sigma to continuously improve their processes and impact their bottom line. In addition, manufacturing organizations are now utilizing Six Sigma in non-traditional functions such as human resources, sales, customer service, purchasing, finance, accounting and product development. Even with the growth of transactional Six Sigma, available curriculum for educational efforts has been primarily manufacturing based. Many early efforts at developing a transactional specific curriculum have been transactional project examples injected into a manufacturing program. This lack of curriculum development can slow the progress of Six Sigma within transactional areas. Prohibiting the curriculum development is the lack of a well defined, acknowledged transactional Six Sigma body of knowledge. The intent of this paper is to establish a body of knowledge.