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Understanding Six Sigma

Six Sigma stands for Six Standard Deviations (Sigma is the Greek letter used to represent standard deviation in statistics) from mean. The ‘Six Sigma’ methodology provides the techniques and tools to improve the capability and reduce the defects in any process.

It was started in Motorola, in its manufacturing division, where millions of parts are made using the same process repeatedly. Six Sigma was heavily inspired by six preceding decades of quality improvement methodologies such as quality control, TQM, and Zero Defects, based on the work of pioneers such as Deming, Juran, Ishikawa, Taguchi, Shewhart and others.

Like its predecessors, 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.

Eventually Six Sigma evolved and applied to other non manufacturing processes. Today you can apply Six Sigma to many fields such as Services, Medical and Insurance Procedures, Call Centers.

Six Sigma methodology improves any existing business process by constantly reviewing and re-tuning the process. The statistical representation of Six Sigma describes quantitatively how a process is...