What is Six Sigma?

Keeping it simple --- Six Sigma is…“Solving problems with data to achieve results”

Adding a little more complexity --- Six Sigma was developed out of necessity as a very rigorous and disciplined approach for companies to improve products and services based on their customers’ requirements…an “outside looking in” approach. Six Sigma can improve profits and cut costs, but more importantly, it can keep customers loyal as well as improve a company’s competitive advantage. Six Sigma can be used for a wide variety of purposes such as new product releases, designing a new process, or fixing a broken process.

The term “Six Sigma” is a measurement system based on the amount of “defects” in a company’s processes. Defects are defined as not meeting customer requirements. The sigma is a measure of st and ard deviation – how many of these defects exist in a company’s processes. Put simply, it is the measure of how far a process is away from achieving near perfect customer satisfaction. Six – or 6 – Sigma is measured at near perfect – meeting customer expectations 99.99966% of the time. The more defects processes have, the lower the Sigma. Most companies we have measured, prior to business performance improvement, perform around a 1 to 2 sigma, which equates to meeting customer expectations 30% to 70% of the time (or roughly 300,000 to 500,000 defects produced per 1 million units). These numbers are staggering and can be extremely detrimental to customer satisfaction with products and services. Although 6 Sigma is difficult to achieve in some industries, a 4 Sigma (meeting customer expectations 99.4% of the time) is realistic for most service and transactional environments.

Six Sigma uses a variety of tools and techniques to achieve superior process performance, such as:

• Data Based Decision Making
• Voice of Customer / Customer Surveying
• Baselining / Measuring Process and Product Performance
• Metric Identification and Collection
• Lean / Process Value Analysis
• Benchmarking “Best In Class” Companies
• Risk Analysis / Assessment
• Implementation Planning / Management
• Change Management
• Dashboards

When companies employ Six Sigma tools and techniques, they change the behavior or “status quo” thinking and approach of how work gets done. Process performance is measured by a new standard of excellence through the identification, measurement, and eventual superior improvement of products and processes that lead to greater customer satisfaction.