All about Six Sigma

SIX SIGMA

Six Sigma was originally developed as a set of practices designed to improve business processes and eliminate defects.

In Six Sigma, a defect is defined as anything that could lead to customer dissatisfaction.

Six Sigma asserts that:

• Continuous efforts to achieve stable and predictable process results (i.e. reduce process variation) are of vital importance to business success.

• Manufacturing and business processes have characteristics that can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled.

• Achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management.


Features that set Six Sigma apart from previous quality improvement initiatives include:

• A clear focus on achieving measurable and quantifiable financial returns from any Six Sigma project.

• An increased emphasis on strong and passionate management leadership and support.

• A special infrastructure of “Champions”, “Master Black Belts”, “Black Belts” etc. to lead and implement the Six Sigma approach.

• A clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data, rather than assumptions and guesswork.


A key methodology of Six Sigma is DMAIC.

The basic methodology consists of the following five steps:

• Define process improvement goals that are consistent with customer demands and the enterprise strategy.

• Measure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data.

• Analyze the data to verify cause-and-effect relationships. Determine what the relationships are, and attempt to ensure that all factors have been considered.

• Improve or optimize the process based upon data analysis using techniques like Design of Experiments.

• Control to ensure that any deviations from target are corrected before they result in defects. Set up pilot runs to establish process capability, move on to production, set up control mechanisms and continuously monitor the process.



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