Case Study Bestbuy

Case Study 3

Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics corporation headed in Richfield, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb. It has stores in the United States, canada and mexico. Richard M. Schulze and Gary Smoliak had founded the company in 1966.

• Best Buy was named "Company of the Year" by Forbes magazine in 2004, ranked in the Top 10 of "America's Most Generous Corporations" by Forbes in 2005
• Best Buy’s main idea was to encourage a culture of innovation that makes leaders and employees to think how they did their jobs, to redesign processes, and to launch business initiatives. This made them to learn from both success and failures. This strategy helped to encourage innovation in the DNA of the organization. Senior leadership gave freedom to management to experiment with innovative ventures and activities and “prove out” new concepts.
• Then organization thought that innovation was not related to particular group, everyone is responsible for innovation. Employees with same strengths were placed together to form project teams to generate new ideas and they were given monthly checkins.  Best Buy used tools to conduct individual assessments (Gallup) and to recognize how a person was wired for team dynamics, bring together the right people to form high performing teams (belbin).
• In the early 2000s Best Buy implemented a program known as ROWE (Results-Oriented Work Environment), under which employees could work when and where they liked, as long as they delivered acceptable job performance. The groups are formed and signed up when they were ready for flexible scheduling and when members had developed a sufficient level of faith and confidence. A decade later it had become a part of Best Buy’s culture. They use to learn from failures experimenting with different innovative practices.
• In the mid-2000s this took innovation to store level in an effort to customize marketing and promoting the sale of goods, especially by their presentation in retail outlets. Local initiatives had major success but also sometimes unfortunate results. Stores did not always possess the marketing ability and did not support the Best Buy branding. As one executive described ‘It became innovation without rules. Innovation is not just whatever you can come up with in your head. Without any boundaries, it’s dangerous.

Introducing Lean Six Sigma at Best Buy

LSS is a business management strategy developed by Motorola in 1986 to drive out cost and ensure quality that helps to improve the quality. LSS uses a set of methods and creates experts within the organization naming Black Belts and Green Belts etc., to manage LSS projects. Each Six Sigma project follows a order of steps. A six sigma process is one in which 99.9% of the goods produced are expected to be free of defects.  After so many discussions, investigating various tools, a small group of senior leaders decided that the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology has capability to answer those questions. The group convinced the C-suite.