What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a highly disciplined approach to decision-making that revolves around collecting data to analyze the true costs and benefits of operations.

Collecting this data allows the case for improvements to be made as convincingly as possible to process owners, by translating it into concrete terms rather than statements of opinion or hypothetical improvement. In its most simple sense, Six Sigma is a highly disciplined approach to decision making that helps people focus on improving processes to make them as nearly perfect as possible.

The term “Six Sigma” relates to the number of mathematical defects in a process (a defect being any undesirable result). Six Sigma practitioners focus on systematically eliminating the defects so they can get as close to “zero defects” as possible.

Often, Lean tools can be applied quickly and easily to increase efficiency when a problem is obvious. Six Sigma is better suited to search deeper for problems that may not be apparent on the day-to-day surface, such as problems that involved extended networks or take place in cycles of years.

Ultimately, Six Sigma will help you by:

• Improving the process performance
• Decreasing variation and maintaining consistent quality of the process output
• Reducing defects, thereby improving profits, product quality and customer satisfaction
• Measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling manufacturing and business processes
• Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement, provided that the commitment exists at all levels of the organization

Six Sigma supports transformation efforts through unique statistical controls and a systematic approach. It is a rigorous process improvement strategy that will reduce performance defects and variation, increasing support performance and efficiency.

Employees trained in Six Sigma will contribute to your organization’s transformation by:

• Establishing Customer Critical To Quality (CTQ) Criteria
• Solving the recurring problems
• Developing fact-driven, measurement-based, prioritized transformation projects
• Controlling process variations
• Eliminating defects
• Generating higher throughput
• Created a standardized improvement methodology