Six Sigma Quality Program

The story of Six Sigma begins at Motorola. The company had had a lot of complaints from their customers saying that although they liked doing business with Motorola they wanted a better service level on delivery, order completeness, accuracy in records on transactions etc. The customers further suggested that if they would be better served, Motorola could expect more business in the future. Six Sigma Quality Program can provide the key ingredient of continuing success.

The company therefore launched a long-term Six Sigma Quality Program in 1987 called "The Six Sigma Quality Program". The purpose of the Six Sigma Quality Program was (and still is!) to improve the customer satisfaction by reducing or eliminating defects and variation in products and processes. Six Sigma was established in 1987 through the Motorola Six Sigma Quality Program. The program gained publicity when Motorola won the Malcolm Baldrige quality prize in the USA and further development of the concept took place in the early 1990’s with companies like General Electric, ABB, Honeywell and Allied Signal. Each of these organizations has boasted significant reductions in costs.

So why call it Six Sigma Quality Program? The name was chosen to capture the key point of the quality program i.e. to reduce defects and variation. The "Six Sigma Quality Program" was a huge success. A company committing itself to a Six Sigma Quality Program must put in place an intensive training program for key executives and staff. In turn, these people learn to (1) organize and effectively lead the deployment of the program, and (2) implement and use statistical tools in their business-improvement efforts.

The Six Sigma Quality Program puts emphasis on pleasing the customer and translating the benefits to increased profitability.

A few fundamentals to applying the Six Sigma Quality Program are:

• The need to identify the product or service being provided
• The ability to identify the processes used to deliver the product or service and map them.
• The ability to identify the opportunities for error in each step of the process.

If you can identify the total opportunity for error and count the defects, you can establish the sigma level. For example, if internal end-user support is measured in "UP-Time" or "Response Time", it's a matter of getting the data on current performance. There are about 525,000 minutes per year (the number of opportunities). Six sigma "up time" would allow only about 1.5 minutes of downtime (defects) per year. Once metrics are established and defect data is gathered, the Pareto charts, root cause analysis can begin.

A Six Sigma Quality Program is largely an extension of a TQM quality program. You probably have Process Improvement teams with TQM facilitators. You will need to expand their (statistical) data analysis skills. Team leaders need to focus teams on meeting quantified objectives. Management and teams need to emphasize data-based decision-making. This re-training can be largely accomplished through training as teams undertake new projects without the extensive up-front training involved in a new program. The Six Sigma Quality Program emphasizes pleasing the customer and uses the benefits to increase profitability.