Six Sigma Concepts

Six Sigma Concepts are proactive tactics based on the idea that rather than wasting time and money fixing products that come out wrong, and dealing with the customer-service fallout and refunds that result, companies should work toward achieving "zero defects"--or as close as possible to that mark--in the first place.

Six Sigma Concepts were pioneered in the early eighties and applied to discrete-parts manufacturing processes at Motorola in the United States. Six Sigma Concepts apply equally well to all endeavors, manufacturing and transactional, and to all organizations. Six Sigma Concepts are based on sound fundamental principles and show how to improve any process where work gets done. The methodology is insensitive to whether the process is manufacturing or transactional. Thus, Six Sigma Concepts are appropriate to all work processes under the purview of your company.

These Six Sigma Concepts differ in their implementation and approach. For example, the implementation of Six Sigma Concepts in Indian industries depends very much on the type of industry you are in. Because interpretation of Six Sigma Concepts should be done against the business environment and not purely upon the statistical sense. Though very often, even in west many industries have implemented Six Sigma Concepts to reduce the cost of quality in Administration side of business, but it is always possible to realize the same results even on core business operations (like manufacturing of an automotive component or a development of a software piece).

Six Sigma Concepts evolve from three fundamental ideas:

• That there is cause and effect in all processes and transactions (India, 2000 B.C.).
• All systems and transactions exhibit a certain amount of inherent variability no matter how well they are designed. This variability follows the normal distribution (Germany, 18th century).
• Inherent variability is worsened by causes that are discoverable. Identifying these special causes and eliminating them returns the system to the original state of natural variability (Shewhart, Deming, Taguchi, etc., 20th century).

An effective approach to the training of the Six Sigma Concepts is the use of four weekly modules spread over four months. Between workshop sessions, attendees apply the concepts previously learned to their projects. During this time they also get one-on-one coaching of the application of the techniques to their project. You will learn how to apply Six Sigma Concepts to ensure its success throughout your organization.

The following five-step process embodies the Six Sigma Concepts that you can use to fix any aspect of service delivery failure:

• Learn what is critical to quality: Learn the attributes most important to your customer.
• Identify the defect: Be precise in identifying how you are failing to deliver what the customer wants.
• Know your process capability: Know the strengths and limitations of what your process can deliver.
• Measure service variation: What the customer sees and feels may vary from the service you deliver.
• Create an environment for stable operations: People, processes and technology must come together to ensure consistent, predictable processes.
• Design defect-free services: Design to meet customer needs and your process capabilities.