The Six Sigma Summer Festival

Overcome festival planning challenges with Six Sigma

All around the world, fields, beaches and holiday parks are being invaded by big tops, stages, catering vans and the world’s most famous and infamous talent. The summer festival season has begun, and in this blog we’re looking at what goes on behind the scenes to make these festivals a sound success.

For festival-goers, it's easy. Grab your waterproofs, pack your bags, pitch up your tent and enjoy a fun-filled weekend of music and mud. However, what the festival-goers don't realise is the planning and effort that goes into putting together a great festival and it isn't easy, that's for sure.

When planning a festival on a large scale, organisers need to consider pricing, ticket sales, logistics, staff, promotions and sponsorship. Six Sigma training can create unique annual opportunities to learn from previous years, improve and make the festival even better than the last year. In order to plan a well organised festival and protect the health, welfare and safety of the people attending the event, as well as the employees, contractors and subcontractors at the event, forward planning is essential. How can Six Sigma improve the festival planning process? Applying the Six Sigma process will:

Remove wastage and save costs by mastering predictable and stable process results, which are vital for business success
Can help work towards keeping stakeholders, customers, performers, local residents, sponsors satisfied
Increase ticket sales and concession purchases
Increase overall organisational productivity
Use of quantitative data (ticket sales) and qualitative data (social media) to drive the organisation and its improvements
Can help the planning process and provisions for potential events, e.g. rain

Good planning and management are fundamental to the success of any event. During the course of the year festival planners receive very little data and feedback, it is all based upon the success or failure of the weekend. Six Sigma helps plan and make decisions based on verifiable data and predictions from the year before and projections, rather than guesswork and assumptions which could leave festival organisers losing out on valuable sales and profits.

A festival has a large amount of quantitative data available to gauge its success, from ticket sales to festival loyalty, the number of reliable staff members, attendance at each location within the venue to assess the popularity and social media engagement. The Six Sigma process can help to utilise this information to make the right business decisions.

The large number of well known challenges that accompany festival management means that organisers have plenty of forewarning to apply. The Six Sigma process identifies where any problems exist, isolating their causes and implementing a structured and full mapped-out solution with optimum performance in mind.

Find out how festival organisers overcome these challenges and apply an understanding of Six Sigma to your business by undertaking a Six Sigma training course. To find out more information about our courses, click here.