Meaning Of Six Sigma

By Author: Ekrem Gundogdu
Total Articles: 11
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While reducing variation leads to quality improvement when the target is met, there are broader meanings to the term six sigma and six sigma initiative.

Savvy companies are familiar with the term "Six Sigma", but what does it really mean, and how can Six Sigma Training benefit your enterprise? Simply put, Six Sigma is about generating and analyzing statistics; statistics that affect your profitability, and the products or services provided to your clients.

Many successful six sigma initiatives have reducing variation as one of the tools, but the broader meaning is to improve the business. Six sigma is used to improve the business systems as a whole, often having quality as an underlying edict.

For example, a hospital may use six sigma to improve the occupancy rate, improve bed turnover, reduce emergency room wait time, and reduce administrative check in cycle time. All of these initiatives have a little bit to do with quality, but have a different overall objective.

In order to understand the importance of Six Sigma Training, a brief history of quality assurance standards is appropriate. Starting, ...
... for simplicity, with the First World War, slight variations in ordinance tolerations caused quality failures in weapons factories. Lack of standard calibrations often resulted in serious accidents. Initially, Quality Inspectors were placed to monitor the production process. While helpful, it was clear that there was more to do in the nature of quality. As time passed, Western countries developed Quality Program Requirements in order to try to conform supplier performance to user need. After various iterations, the expansion of quality ideology into industries beyond the military, the institution of the International Organization for Standardization, ("ISO"), and the now famous quality competition from Asia, Japan in particular, ISO 9000, and its offspring were developed.

Granted by Accredited Certification Bodies, after appropriate auditing of quality management, ISO 9001 compliance certificates may be achieved by business organizations. Business visionaries, however, know that, while reaching the high plateaus is essential, in order to both lead and succeed, the pinnacle is the only goal. Utilizing Six Sigma Training to gift your organization, and the personnel who have dedicated their careers to being leaders, with exceptional tools and skills, will allow you, and the clients whose trust makes it all possible, to climb the true path, and plant your flags on the summit.

Six Sigma and other related process improvement methodologies not only focus on measuring site activities, but also with understanding these variables that affects metrics. By understanding these metrics, we can control and influences that have the greatest effect on the bottom line.

For picking out the most important variable, let's look at the 'The law of the vital few', which states that a small number of variables are behind a majority of the effects. For instance, 80% of total revenues is generated by just 20% of sales personnel. Similarly, out of hundreds and thousands of variables, presumably only 20-25 must be relevant and have the greatest effect on the outcome. Within this smaller group, the variables can be ranked according to their impact. The variables that are important should be manipulated first.

Six Sigma realizes the need to narrow down the important variables and then manipulate them. Therefore, it has introduced a framework that helps to determine and prioritize those that are mission critical. Six Sigma can be implemented during any problem phase of a business, where the problem can impact customer's perception of quality. It is noteworthy that most failures in converting a customer into a lead, sale, subscription or registration occur due to tainted perception of the customer, including lack of value, trust, security and confidence.

There are many tools included in the six sigma discipline. To name a few, there is the CT tree (critical to quality, cost, schedule, etc), cause and effect matrix, (FMEA) failure mode and effects analysis, DOE (design of experiments), hypothesis testing, analysis of means and standard deviation, advanced statistical analysis. There are many others within the discipline that a trained black belt will explore and use when necessary.

Ekrem Gundogdu writes articles about different subjects, including ISO 9001. To read his articles see his ISO 14001 website.