Wednesday, December 25, 2013

What is Six Sigma

What is Six Sigma

First, what it is not. It is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliche. Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps us focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. Why ”Sigma“? The word is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many “defects” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to “zero defects” as possible. Six Sigma has changed the DNA of GE — it is now the way we work — in everything we do and in every product we design.

Six Sigma is a set of techniques, and tools for process improvement. It was developed by Motorola in 1986. Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization ("Champions", "Black Belts", "Green Belts", "Yellow Belts", etc.) who are experts in the methods.
Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified value targets, for example: reduce process cycle time, reduce pollution, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and increase profits.
The term Six Sigma originated from terminology associated with manufacturing, specifically terms associated with statistical modeling of manufacturing processes. The maturity of a manufacturing process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates. 
A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defective parts/million),

Key Concepts of Six Sigma

At its core, Six Sigma revolves around a few key concepts.
Critical to Quality: Attributes most important to the customer
Defect: Failing to deliver what the customer wants
Process Capability: What your process can deliver
Variation: What the customer sees and feels
Stable Operations: Ensuring consistent, predictable processes to improve
what the customer sees and feels
Design for Six Sigma: Designing to meet customer needs and process capability


Why The Service Sector Feels That Six Sigma Is Not For Them



Why The Service Sector Feels That Six Sigma Is Not For Them

The most obvious reason why service companies keep away from Six Sigma is because they perceive it as a manufacturing tool. Service organizations feel that because their companies have a large amount of human work force, there are no measurable defects to be corrected. However, experts say this is not true. A recent survey has shown that service companies that have invested in Six Sigma are all saving millions of dollars for every project. Human resources make up a large part of all service organizations. To conquer this problem, leaders of the industry can be trained in Six Sigma to balance their employment expertise with statistics-based analytical tools.

The fear of metrics is another obstacle that stands in the way of the service sector and Six Sigma. Most people feel that Six Sigma sounds too technical. The importance of metrics is to give an insight into the business working processes. Service based companies need to focus all their attention on developing Six Sigma projects that specialize in their business needs like customer and cash generation. Convincing the service sector about the merits of taking up Six Sigma has proven to be a big challenge. Most service companies still believe that Six Sigma can only benefit the manufacturing industry.

How Six Sigma Can Benefit The Service Industry

Six Sigma goes in to the details of improving customer service, generating business expansion and gaining knowledge about the service sectors business processes. Most service industries revolve around areas of finance, human resources and sales and marketing. Hence, Six Sigma delves deeply into the subject of soft skills. Six Sigma can be applied to a company that provides housekeeping services. Firstly, the companies working processes would need to be understood. Using the DMIAC method or the define-measure-improve-analyze-control method, Six Sigma can definitely implement quality in any industry. As the main aim of this methodology is to reduce defects, the first step would be detecting the particular defect. Secondly, data will be collected to observe how, why and how often these defects occur. Next, the 
Six Sigma team implements an outstanding employee’s method of working as the normal method for all employees. Finally, new employees are taught the correct techniques. 

Six Sigma is useful in the field of sales and marketing as well. According to Six Sigma data, during sales, too much face time with a customer can prove to be counter-productive. Changing this process can result in an increase in the percentage of sales per product. Other industries that Six Sigma has assisted in the past are the financial service sector, insurance companies, management companies, educational institutions, high-tech companies, state agencies and many more.