The survival of any organization depends on the quality of its performance and so does its growth. Six Sigma is a methodology or a management philosophy that enables an organization to check and measure its performance quality and at the same time helps improve it. Six Sigma performs an appropriate disciplined data analysis, eliminates defects that cause poor performance and helps the organization to improve processes and thereby improve the overall performance. It is a statistical representation that helps in identifying the performance of the organization in quantitative terms. Mathematically, Six Sigma means six standard deviations from mean.
Six Sigma is an intense and rigorous methodology that exists is disciplined organization and does not allow operation of “good” or “competitive” processes, it rather challenges and questions the way anything is done. Six sigma leads to reducing the variations in processes and thereby guiding to fewer defects, lower costs, higher revenues and increased capacity etc.
Six Sigma through a measurement based strategy aims at improvement of the targeted processes. The methodology at Six Sigma states that the defects produced by a process should not be more than 3.4, in order to achieve its service standard. These number of defects means “the rate of defects in any process should be less than the rate of 3.4 per million opportunities”. The philosophy behind six sigma believes that if you can identify the number of defects that exist in the process than you can systematically aim at removing all of them and get close to perfection as much as possible.
As a management philosophy, Six Sigma was initiated by Motorola in its manufacturing division, where several parts were made using the same process repeatedly. Subsequently Six Sigma was applied to other non manufacturing units as well. In today’s times, the application of Six Sigma is wide spread almost in all fields like insurance, health care, services and BPOs etc.
The principles and techniques used by Six Sigma are quite basic like business, statistics and engineering. These are the core elements of Six Sigma.
There are 2 Six Sigma sub processes – Six Sigma DMAIC and Six Sigma DMADV. DMAIC is a process that defines measures, analyzes, improves, and controls existing processes that have fallen below the Six Sigma condition. Six Sigma DMADV on the other hand defines measures, analyzes, designs, and verifies new processes which are trying to achieve Six Sigma quality.
Today Six Sigma as a concept is practiced by most of the top performing companies like General Electric and Texas Instruments amongst several others.
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