Celebrating Six Sigma’s 20th Anniversary

By Cass Jacoby, RCS Reporter. 

Learn about how Six Sigma culture helped perfect the process of making shingles at TAMKO. 

RoofersCoffeeShop® celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Six Sigma culture at TAMKO in this episode of Roofing Road Trips. Heidi J. Ellsworth visits with Mike Shifferd, Wayne Westgaard and Doug Spears of TAMKO to talk about the company’s Six Sigma culture and how it is a master class in excellence of the roofing industry. The three talk about how they helped with the implementation of Six Sigma methodology at TAMKO and championed the Continuous Improvement initiative. 

Doug Spears has been with TAMKO for 23 years. He kicks off the conversation by explaining how Six Sigma came to TAMKO. “I think the best place to start is even before Six Sigma back in 1980 when TAMKO adopted the Deming philosophies...we work with that same constancy of purpose. We are continuing on with the same thought, same mind frame, just moving it forward,” says Doug. “We had a group of three executives that went to a local plant that had already deployed Six Sigma to see how it affected them...After going, they decided, wow, this is something that we need. This will work well for us, fit into our culture, so we decided to deploy Six Sigma.” 

“The Greek symbol for Sigma is the standard deviation of a process, so Six Sigma is six standard deviations,” explains Mike Shifferd, the current director of Six Sigma at TAMKO. “Six Sigma is a project management methodology focused on continuous improvement to improve our products and our processes in a way to optimize those things rather than to invest in capital improvements on things, but really to optimize our processes.” 

TAMKO’s Six Sigma is all about discovering what the perfect process is. “I want to make the perfect shingle, and it really just seems impossible. How do you do that? You do it with a process,” says Wayne . “That's really what we had to understand. What is the process to make the shingle perfect, and then how do we reduce all those variation points all along the way in the life of that shingle so that, when the roofers pull those out of the package, they get the same shingle every time.” 

Listen to the podcast to learn more about Six Sigma culture and how it helped TAMKO build a process that ensures quality. 

Learn more about TAMKO in their RoofersCoffeeShop® Directory or visit www.tamko.com.