Abstract
Six Sigma have been a management system that have supported process improvement in the mining industry for several decades, but making production processes efficient and safe doesn´t make the industry comply with its social responsibility with the communities nor allows it to meet the needs and expectations of critical stakeholders on their backyards.
In this presentation we explore why it is so important during this time to comply with our social responsibility, what is six sigma and how can it contribute to review analyze and bring to the table a suitable process to meet critical stakeholders issues, and propose suitable ways to manage them in a responsible and effective way.
Starting with the Voice of the Customer (VOC) Six Sigma can provide a suitable process to understand Stakeholders requirements, transform them into measurable processes and come up with alternative strategies to meet them in a cost effective and satisfactory way to reduce risk and time to complete the steps of the process to bring the project to production.
In the presentation we conduct a critical review of several key projects that have been stopped due to a lack of social licence and support from surrounding communities:
- - Conga, Newmont •- Loma Miranda Falcondo •- Pascua Lama Barrick A root cause analysis is presented for each one of them to discuss why the corporate social responsibility (CSR) process have failed and what options could have been used to obtain a different outcome.
Key tools from the Six Sigma arsenal are presented in how they could support better the social responsibility process, and how they could lead to a more robust CSR. At the end we present opinions and points of views of several experts in the field of how six sigma could have helped CSR in the indicated cases and compare with author paper "practical ways to improve relations with the community to fulfill CSR"