The Six Sigma Process – What does it teach?

Six Sigma is a business management strategy that was originally developed by Motorola in the year 1986. At present this process or strategy is widely used in a lot of sectors of the industry and there have been some considerable amount of controversy surrounding it too.

The Six Sigma process teaches the practitioner to improve the quality of their process outputs by detecting or identifying the root causes of errors and removing them. It also teaches one how to minimize variability in the business and manufacturing processes. The Six Sigma certification is based on a set of methods for quality management which includes statistical methods. These projects are carried out within an organization in a proper and precise manner by following a series of defined steps which has its own individual quantified financial targets.

In other words, Six Sigma teaches the organizations how to strive for near perfection by measuring the quality of the production. It is a very disciplined approach that is based on data and methodology for the purpose of eliminating the defects in any process of an organization, be it the manufacturing process or transactional processes. The teachings of this process are invaluable to a business concern.

The Six Sigma process is important for industries like health care, military, transportation, computer manufacturing, etc. It teaches one how to ensure that the things are done in the right manner right from the first try. The Six Sigma management book is definitely worth reading, although it may be very detailed but it still helps to have some sort of entrepreneur or visionary front in order to achieve success with this process.

Out of the many teachings of Six Sigma, the main teaching revolves around how to describe quantitatively the performance of a process by means of a statistical representation. In order to achieve Six Sigma objective, a particular process should not produce more than 3.4 defects in as many as a million opportunities. What is a Six Sigma defect? Well it can be defined as all the things that are not included in the customer specifications. A Six Sigma opportunity on the other hand is described ass the total amount of chances for a defect. There is also a Six Sigma calculator that can help in these calculations.

The main objective of this methodology is to implement a strategy based on measurement to improves processes and reduce variation. Application of the Six Sigma improvement projects also aids a lot here. There are two sub-methodologies of the Six Sigma – DMAIC and DMADV.

DMAIC is an acronym for define, measure, analyze, improve, control and this is an improvement system for the existing processes that falls below the specification and require some incremental improvement. DMADV is an acronym for define, measure, analyze, design, verify. This is actually an improvement system that is used for the purpose of development of new processes and products at the quality levels of Six Sigma. This system can be employed in the event of a current process requiring more accurate incremental improvement. All in all, if one follows what is taught in the Six Sigma process carefully then one can achieve the desired results.