Now more and more people talk about Six Sigma and more and more companies use Six Sigma . What is Six Sigma ?
Definition: Six Sigma is a business process that allows companies to achieve drastic financial improvements by “designing and monitoring everyday business activities in ways that minimize waste and resources while increasing customer satisfaction”. Traditionally, quality control programs have focused on detecting and correcting manufacturing and design defects. However, the Six Sigma methodology focuses on techniques that prevent defects and errors from occurring at any stage of the process.
Statistically speaking, the phrase “six sigma” means six standard deviations. For a process to be six sigma it must have six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit. This allows only 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). A process’s sigma value is raised by lowering the variation around the mean. When a process reaches the level of six sigma, it is often said to have zero variation and therefore ‘zero defects.’
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Six Sigma traces its origins to the quest to achieve higher quality at Motorola. This quest began in 1979 when executive Art Sundry proclaimed, “The real problem at Motorola is that our quality stinks!” In the coming years, Motorola studied the relationship between higher quality and lower development costs in manufacturing. They found that contrary to widely held opinions, there is a positive correlation between higher quality and lower development costs.
Six sigma is a business process that companies need to try and achieve today. With more and more competition in industry today, companies need to have processes that lowers wastes within the supply chain as to better compete on price and costs. With an economy that is becoming more and more price conscious, companies must be able to lower their production costs if they still want to have the same profit margins as before. The best way to do this is have processes in place that eliminate unwanted or unneeded steps within the supply chain. It will be interesting to see how many more companies in the future go to this six sigma process.
First, I would like to list what I believe are the two greatest attributes of six sigma.
1. The quality improvement has a specified structure, which dedicates personel to quality improvement. As opposed to other quality initiatives people are full time dedicated to carry on improvement projects.
2. The quality improvement team lead, I apologize for not remembering the name, reports directly with the president, this along with the mandate that all management be introduced to six sigma means that the executives hve true buy-in to the plan and that six sigma is not just another plan to make people work more.
But I have to disagree that six sigma is the future, now Lean six sigma is becoming the hot topic. The six sigma tools are still used, but the concepts of lean are now also emphasized. I believe that the additional focus on lean constitutes a significant difference between six sigma and lean six sigma, and as we get closer to mass customization I believe that lean will be every bit as important if not more so than quality.
Jason
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