The History Of Ssgc

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

From the past two decades Six Sigma business strategy has become the most acceptable quality improvement methodology used by various organizations. Being fact based Six Sigma is a data driven philosophy of quality improvement that gives importance to prevention of defects over detection. It helps organizations in achieving customer satisfaction and give improve bottom-line results by reducing variation, miscalculation or waste, therefore implementation of six sigma support competitive advantage of a company.

Six Sigma was initially developed by Motorola in the 1980’s. It was a project to reduce defects in production process. Motorola implemented the Six Sigma system on an experimental/trial basis in order to resolve the quality issues occurring in the company frequently. Six Sigma was used as a trial and it yielded brilliant results which were easily seen in the overall performance of the organization.

After the success of sig sigma in Motorola, the methodology become popular in the industry and implemented by many other companies like General electric’s, that reaped maximum benefits from Six Sigma. This company is famous for its diversity in numerous fields and also for the research and development section. In spite of hiring the best employees and implementing cutting edge technology, it was facing problems with the quality of products and services during the 90’s. It followed the path showed by Motorola and emerged as one of the most successful and revenue generating company of the year. Companies like Wipro, Sat Yam, HP, Caterpillar and Microsoft are the famous examples of six sigma success.

The base of the Six Sigma is statistics. The term sigma stands for deviation from a mean of a data set by which we can calculate the variation whereas "Six Sigma" is for six standard deviations from the mean. After implementation when a process achieve the Six Sigma level, it entails that the process is running close to the perfection and only making defects of 3.4 per million units, hence by using this statistical tool companies are able to minimize the amount of variation by recognizing and elimination problems that result in variations in the process and enhance the output quality and at the same time save money as a bottom-line results.

The reason for keeping Six Sigma as bases for our thesis is the current struggle of manufacturing industry toward quality. These days in every industry quality management is considered imperative in achieving competitive advantage. Because of the growing competition manufacturing organizations are experiencing pressure to improve quality while decreasing cost and increase production volumes with limited resources.

Traditionally the quality initiatives like Statistical Quality control (SQC), zero defects and total quality management were used for many years while Six Sigma is the most recent quality improvement initiatives that are accepted by the industries across the globe. The reason of its popularity is implementation of Six Sigma brings more constructive results to organizations as compared to all traditional quality improvement tools.

Six Sigma has gained much deserved recognition in past few years as more and more companies implemented it and guarantees its usefulness in improving better outcomes. Many companies have deeply looked into Six Sigma's track record and surmised that it won't work for them because Six Sigma is developed and only suitable for manufacturing environment so can they apply any tool that is meant for manufacturing on businesses who are more people focused. Organizations such as financial service providers, health care systems and educational facilities are frequently asking this question, whereas others have gone so far as to take rise towards Six Sigma and have witnessed the first-hand results.

According to Rick Schleysener, master consultant at six sigma academy people who say that Six Sigma doesn’t suits us because we are in service sector haven’t understood the concept of Six Sigma because recent researches shows that many service providers are saving millions of dollars per project by implementing this tool in their organization. According to the experts of the major hurdles service organizations must overcome is the belief, because their company is human-driven.

Our research aims to apply only the principle of Six Sigma methodology known as DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) to the Sui Southern Gas Company Limited Pakistan. Six Sigma is also gaining popularity in Pakistan as we can see there are various Six Sigma providers available in Pakistan and many companies are going for it. As we have discussed that traditionally service companies look at Six Sigma as quality improvement tool for manufacturing environment only but now there are newer ways through which they can apply quality control techniques on people processed businesses. We know that Sui Southern Gas Company Limited is facing several issues regarding UFG, optimum utilization of resources, customers complains, balancing short term and long term priorities, adoption of new technology, and customers complains, so our research will help identify implementation of Six Sigma in SSGC, how implementation of Six Sigma benefit the performance of SSGC and how can they

History of SSGC

SSGC was created on March 30, 1989, following a series of mergers of three pioneering energy companies which are: Sui Gas Transmission Company, Karachi Gas Company, and Indus Gas Company. Sui Gas Transmission Company Limited was formed in 1954 with its transmission to the consumption centers at Karachi and responsibility of gas purification at the Sui field in Baluchistan. Two distribution companies were established in 1955 and were responsible for the distribution of gas to consumers in Karachi and in other towns along the route of the transmission pipeline between Sui and Karachi. In 1985, these two distribution companies were merged to form Southern Gas Company Limited and later, in 1989, Southern Gas Company Limited and Sui Gas Transmission Company Limited were merged to form the Sui Southern Gas Company Limited.

Introduction of SSGC

Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) is Pakistan's leading integrated gas Company. The company is engaged in the transmission and distribution of natural gas in addition construction of high pressure transmission and low pressure distribution systems.

SSGC transmission system extends from Sui in Balochistan to Karachi in Sindh comprising over 3,220 KM of high pressure pipeline ranging from 12 - 24" in diameter and has an authorized working capital of Rs. 10 billion of which Rs 6.7 billion is issued and fully paid up. Majority of shares are owned by Government which is presently over 70%.