Resources - What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is an extremely successful management strategy that changes the way businesses are managed to increase focus on the customer, increase data driven decision-making and permanently fix systemic quality issues. It has successfully been adopted by many of the worlds most successful companies such as General Electric.

Six Sigma also provides the backbone of many company management and talent development programmes.

At the heart of Six Sigma is a set of statistically robust decision-making and quality improvement tools that allow for fast route cause identification and a permanent solving of the business problems.

Many companies have also had significant success focusing Six Sigma on their product and service development processes (DfSS). Here, Six Sigma provides tools that allow real customer requirements to be captured and turned into design specifications, and with a continual focus on providing products and services that consistently meet the truly important design requirements and therefore satisfy customer requirements.

Proven Success Rates

SigmaPro have implemented Six Sigma to solve various problems and constraints : -

Boiler manufacturing company saves £1.2M in warranty costs.
Insurance Company improves data delivery to SLA from 89% to 96%.
Police recruitment cycle time reduced by 13 weeks.
Security printing organisation reduces cut registration scrap by 80% and saves £480K.

Six Sigma Origin

Originally developed by Motorola in the 1980's Six Sigma was made famous by Jack Welch CEO of General Electric (GE), one of the worlds largest and most successful companies.

The list of other companies that have, or are in the process of deploying Six Sigma as part of their business strategy is long, and reads like a who's who of the business world.

Key Methodologies

Six Sigma has two key methodologies DMAIC; designed to improve existing business processes and prodcuts and DMADV, to create new fault-proofed products, services and processes.

Six Sigma Key Concepts

Six Sigma has been developed to help businesses focus on some of the most fundamental and critical key concepts. These are:

Concept Name	Business Application
Critical to Quality	The attributes of a product or service most important to customers
Defects	Instances of non conformity to customer requirements (DPMO)
Process Capability	What our processes are capable of deliverig with respect to customer requirements (Process Sigma)
Variation	Customers dont feel the average, they feel the extremes of variation
Stable Operations	Is the process effected by special cause as well as common cause variation? Processes subjected to special cause variability are likely to be out of control, unstable and unpredictable
Design for Six Sigma	How to design products, services and processes to meet customer needs and process capability

DMAIC - Improving Existing Processes

The first and foremost application of Six Sigma is to identify problems within existing processes and subsequently removing these. DMAIC [pronounced "deh"MAY-ik"] aims at existing business processes and stands for:

Define the goals consistent with customer demands and enterprise strategy
Measure current process and collect relevant data for future comparison
Analyze to find relationships and find statistically validated casuality factors
Improve the process based on findings in measure and analyse
Control to verify variances are removed permanently

DMADV - Designing New Products, Services and Processes

The second methodology is used to design products, services and processes that have higher capability and are more predictable and easier to control. DMADV [pronounced "deh"MAD-veh"] helps to achieve a defect free performance through:

Define the project goals (internal and external)
Measure and determine customer needs and specifications; benchmark competitors and industry
Analyze the design options and produce a conceptual design to meet customer needs
Design (in detail) product, service or process to meet customer needs
Validate the design performance and ability to meet customer needs.

Key Roles For Implementation

Six Sigma defines key roles within its deployment These roles are consistent with varying levels of qualification, time commitment and responsibility. These roles are: