Dubai Cable Company (Ducab) received the Joint Manufact-uring Industry Sector Award of the prestigious Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) Occupational Health & Safety Awards for 2002. It shared the award with DuPont UK Ltd., beating hundreds of other manufacturing firms.

Ducab also announced recently that it has completed the first phase of the Six Sigma Quality improvement programme. Ducab became the first company in the Middle East to implement this internationally renowned programme with Motorola University. The Six Sigma programme was first devised and implemented at Motorola and is now offered worldwide through Motorola University. The appointment of five professional Six Sigma Black Belts to oversee the process of change at Ducab ensures that the company is well on its way to becoming a Six Sigma organisation.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester, president of RoSPA, presented his organisation's award at a ceremony held in Birmingham, UK. Ducab officials Graham Cheetham, general manager (manufacturing), and George Frank, training officer and safety advisor, received it on behalf of their company.

"The receipt of this prestigious award by Ducab is a landmark achievement for the young but rapidly progressing manufacturing industry in the UAE. The RoSPA award is an acknowledgement of the fact that despite its late entry into the scenario, the manufacturing industry in the UAE has set itself exacting standards of safety and occupational health, comparable to those with the best in the world," said Ducab managing director Colin J. Paskins.

Commenting on the Six Sigma feat, Paskins commented: "We have always prided ourselves on being a company that builds on its own strengths to offer our clients the best in products and services. We are constantly upgrading and enhancing the existing processes in our organisation to create best practices across the entire spectrum of the manufacturing, sales and marketing processes.

"The Six Sigma quality management programme is a measure of quality that strives for near perfection, by eliminating defects in any process and will go a long way towards helping Ducab achieve its objective of furthering its reputation of being a truly quality-driven organisation that places the needs of its clients at the top of its list of priorities."

Six Sigma is described as a disciplined, scientific approach and methodology for eliminating defects in any process - from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications. A methodology that is well rooted in mathematics and statistics, the Six Sigma programme goes well beyond the qualitative eradication of customer-perceptible defects.

The objective of the Six Sigma Quality process is the implementation of a measurement-based strategy that focuses on process improvement to reduce the output variation to six deviations, between the upper and lower limits of customer specifications. This is accomplished through the use of two Six Sigma sub-methodologies: DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design and Verify). The statistical representation of Six Sigma describes quantitatively how a process is performing. A Six Sigma opportunity is then the total quantity of chances for a defect. To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

At Ducab, the programme has been given a jump-start with a training programme for all key managers followed by the intensive training and appointment of five dedicated Six Sigma Black Belts to oversee the implementation of the programme at various levels in the company. "In keeping with Ducab's commitment to the UAE government's nationalisation programme, two of the five designated Black Belts at the company are UAE nationals, who have achieved their standing on the basis of their professional approach and dedication," a Ducab statement said.

Currently the five Black Belts are focusing on the various charters or areas of both the sales and manufacturing processes. First introduced in October last year, the five Black Belts have recently completed their second training session from Motorola University. The benefits of the Six Sigma programme have already begun to make their appearance at Ducab in terms of cost reduction, customer satisfaction and business improvement.