The six sigma method

– Six Sigma is probably the best known approach to quality management today. Many companies strive to meet Six Sigma targets, and many employees are trained in these techniques. The goal of Six Sigma is to provide reliable products and consistent services to your customers. You’re not looking to eliminate defects and errors but to reduce them to a very small number. You accomplish this by following a very specific method for improving the quality of key processes within your business. The method is called DMAIC. Now I’m only going to highlight the principles of this method, so there’s a handout in the exercise files that explains this in more detail. To apply the DMAIC methodology you first define the process you wish to improve. Then you measure and analyze the defects found within that process. You now find ways to improve the process by reducing defects and then you put control mechanisms in place so that the improvements are everlasting. Let’s look deeper into the improve part of DMAIC because this is the heart of Six Sigma. Process improvements focus on three things, the first is defects. You don’t want more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities to make a mistake. If you imagine building a house, which is done by hand, there must be a million or more opportunities. A finished house with less than four defects would indeed be a quality product. That brings us to the second focus of our improvement effort, reducing variability. If you want to reduce defects tighten up your processes. All processes have some natural variation that’s acceptable, say plus or minus three, and that’s okay. You’re working towards reducing inconsistencies and the natural result is fewer defects. What does the customer think is critical to quality? Those are the first processes you should be working on. Thanks to that customer focus Six Sigma is no longer just a statistics based tool that controls manufacturing defects. Now it’s a sound business strategy that drives process improvement across an entire organization. For example, you can apply these methods to reduce variability in shipments to your customers. You can work with suppliers to reduce defects in materials arriving at your factory. And you can apply these principles to reduce errors in day-to-day accounting practices. In fact, you can apply it on any level of the organization and on any scale. It doesn’t have to be a company wide program, it often can be applied to just one process or activity. Here’s an assignment for you. The next time you’re in a busy restaurant for lunch notice how they’re taking care of the crowd. Do you see a lot of opportunities for a mistake? Do you see a lot of variability in the menu and the service? Maybe the staff is in control of their processes or maybe they could use a little help from Six Sigma. or maybe they could use a little help from Six Sigma.