Six Sigma Professionals, Inc

What Is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a philosophy, a measure, a methodology and a culture enabler that provides businesses with perspective and tools to achieve new levels of performance both in services and products. In Six Sigma, the focus is on process improvement to increase capability and reduce variation. The vital few inputs are chosen from the entire system of controllable and noise variables and the focus of improvement is on controlling these vital few inputs.

Six Sigma as a philosophy helps companies achieve very low defects per million opportunities over long term exposure. Six Sigma as a measure gives us a statistical scale to measure your progress and benchmark other companies, processes or products. The defect per million opportunities measurement scale ranges over the scale of from zero to one million while the sigma scale ranges from 0 to 6. Six Sigma Professionals, Inc. methodologies used in Six Sigma, Design For Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Six Sigma build upon all of the tools that have evolved to date but put them into a principle driven framework with leadership in integrating Axiomatic Design, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, Robust Design, and Theory of Constraints . This framework of tools allow Six Sigma Professionls, Inc. help companies to achieve the lowest defects per million opportunities possible.

Six Sigma evolved from the early TQM efforts. Motorola initiated the movement and then it spread to Asea Brown Boveri, Texas Instruments Missile Division and then Allied Signal. It was at this juncture that Jack Welch became aware from Larry Bossidy of the power of Six Sigma and in the nature of a fast follower committed GE to embracing the movement. It was GE who bridged the gap between just manufacturing process and product focus and took it to what was first called transactional processes and later changed to commercial processes. One of the reasons that Jack was so interested in this program was that an employee survey had just been completed and it revealed that the top level managers of the company believed that GE had invented quality, after all Armand Feigenbaum worked at GE; however the vast majority of employees didnt think GE could spell quality. Six Sigma has turned out to be the methodology to accomplish Crosbys goal of Zero Defects. Understanding what the key process input variables are and that variation and shift can occur we can create controls that maintain six-sigma, performance on any product or service and in any process.

In addition to defining Six Sigma as a capability measure, it is also a management and culture paradigm. The fundamental definition of Six Sigma capability refers to a process where "the center of the process is away from the nearest specification limit by six standard deviations of the process". The fundamental Definition of Six Sigma as a management paradigm refers to the business initiative undertaken at an enterprise to systematically enhance the performance and culture of its business processes (including product development) to better exceed customer expectations, resulting in a tangible business gain.

Literally speaking, sigma, is the symbol for standard deviation. It is a measure of variance. The goal of Six Sigma is to reduce variation so there are no more than +/- six standard deviations (Six Sigma) between the mean and the nearest specification limit. When a process is operating at Six Sigma, no more than 3.4 'defects' per million opportunities are produced.

Sigma (literally speaking, the 18th letter in the Greek alphabet, ?) is a letter of the Greek alphabet used as a symbol by statisticians to mark a bell curve showing the likelihood that a process will deviate from the norm. The narrow Definition of Six Sigma is 3.4 defects per 1 million opportunities or 99.9997 percent perfect. Today, most companies operate at Three Sigma, which allows 66,803 defects per million (93.332 percent perfect).

Six Sigma is as a 'culture change' positions a company for greater customer satisfaction, profitability, and competitive-ness. Considering the company-wide commitment to Six Sigma at places like General Electric and Motorola, 'culture change' is certainly a valid way to de-scribe Six Sigma. But it is also possible to do Six Sigma without making a frontal assault on your company culture. As a new paradigm, Six Sigma is a cultural transformation enabler which repositions companies in the direction of increased customer satisfaction, growth, profitability and competitiveness. The most fundamental features of the Six Sigma is a thorough understanding of customer expectations, the institution of a decision mechanism based on data and the disciplined practice of the processes, as a result of which

Defects are reduced
Return processes are shortened
Stock levels decline
Productivity is increased and costs are reduced resulting in a high level of customer satisfaction and increased profitability stemming from increased market share.

Six Sigma is a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining and maximizing business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by the close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing, improving, and reinventing business process. It is a business process that allows companies to drastically improve their bottom line by designing and monitoring everyday business activities in ways that minimize waste and resources while increasing customer satisfaction. This process provides specific methods to re-create the process so that defects and errors never arise again.