How to assess the benefits of Six Sigma
Some of the world’s leading organisations, including General Electric, AlliedSignal, and Dupont, have reported impressive results using a process known as Six Sigma. Is the process suitable for your organisation? If its cost is prohibitive, you might consider using selected components of the strategy. At least you should be familiar with Six Sigma and what the concept has to offer. Here are some details and features to help your exploration...
1. Define Six Sigma.
Six Sigma is a business process that helps companies to improve their bottom lines by designing and monitoring daily business activities to minimise waste and resources. Its main objective is to improve customer satisfaction. Although it builds on the principles of kaizen, and the works of W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, Six Sigma is more than simple quality control and statistics. It doesn’t merely detect and correct errors: it provides specific methods for recreating processes so that errors never arise in the first place.
2. Understand the significance of sigma.
The sigma concept was created in the early 1980s. In 1994, it led to the forming of the Six Sigma Academy by Dr Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder. Six Sigma assigns a sigma value to a process based on the number of defects per opportunity resulting from that process. Higher sigma values indicate better processes and products; lower values represent less desirable ones. Six Sigma (99.99966 per cent perfection) is far more desirable than three sigma (the level most organisations achieve). The higher the sigma level, the less likely the process will produce defects.
3. Work at reducing variations.
Six Sigma is based on a continuous reduction of process and product variations that indicate defects. In simple terms, this reduction is achieved by:
- defining the ‘perfect’ process
- measuring how the process performs
- identifying and analysing (using statistical techniques) the gap between current performance and the ideal, and then pinpointing the causes of defects in the process
- initiating new and better ways of improving the process, thus reducing the gap or variation.
Various tools - statistical and other - are available to assist.
