This is an American retail company specialized in home improvements and construction services, founded in 1978. Home Depot is familiar with Military analogies which seem to run all operations especially under management of Robert L. Nardelli. Born in 1948, Nardelli had earlier served in General Electric and Chrysler. Nardelli became Chief Executive Officer of Home depot in 2000 December. Immediately after his arrival, Nardelli changed the management of Home depot as a decentralized entrepreneurial business, which was used by the founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank.
To reshape Home depot, Robert Nardelli imported ideas, people and platitude from the military as most of his recruits served in the military and underwent two year training for mangers. With this, there was a cultural overhaul at Home depot that changed its direction from the previous low profile, collaborative, collegial and demanding culture, to culture of "fear". The previous managers allowed immense autonomy for mangers of different departments in Home depot. This form of management saw the decline of sale in Home depot in the late 1990's.
Robert Nardelli is popularized to have instilled a "culture of fear" in Home depot. This kept employees constantly worried of being laid off. This is said to affect customer service at Home depot. He adopted a style of leadership, six sigma, which was previously used at General electric in Home depot, as an attempt to streamline the management and improve the company's growth.
Robert Nardelli realized that as a manger, he needed to have control of the business in order to streamline Home depot's operations and realize the much needed growth. Control is needed by management in order to adapt to change or upcoming uncertainties, discover irregularities, reduce costs, realize opportunities, facilitate team work, and increase productivity. In order to renovate Home depot, Nardelli adopted the six sigma methodology of management.
The six sigma methodology has two methodologies; DMAIC and DMAIC. The former is used for existing processes while DMAIC is used during creation of new products or processes. The advantage of DMAIC is that the resultant products or projects are predictable and of higher quality. DMAIC has five important steps that are emphasized. They include:
The steps in DMADV are:
The sigma focuses on data usage during problem solving in order to lower deficiencies and create systematic approaches. At the core of the six sigma are the statistical analysis and tools.
The six sigma has roles of implementation that are used. These roles include;
This control process would efficiently work in the health care setting. It could save costs on hospital bills as doctors would be keener at diagnosing the right ailment and treatment as required. A common mistake in the health care setting is wrong diagnosis of patient's problems. As much as patients pay a lot of money for tests, not every test is carried as most doctors guess and eliminate possibilities using the patients' symptoms. Treatment is begun before evaluation of all tests leading to wrong diagnosis and higher costs. In the long run, patients come back for treatment. With the six sigma, doctors would carefully go through tests by employing different people in charge of every stage, hence making it easier for all to analyze the results. These results would later be scrutinized through a number of questions till a favorable answer is got. This evaluation would therefore lead to correct diagnosis and better treatment.
