Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a business concept that answers customers' demand for high quality and defect-free business processes. Customer satisfaction and its improvement should be the highest priorities of any business. In other words, Six Sigma is about abandoning the uncertainty of goals and forecasts .

History of the Concept

There have always been many statistical methods for measuring and improving quality. Six Sigma was born when Motorola published its Six Sigma quality program in 1987. Six Sigma was developed by Mikel J. Harry. The program gained publicity when Motorola won the Malcolm Baldrige quality prize. The further development took place in the turn of the decade in ABB where Harry worked as a vice-president in charge of quality systems development.

What is Six Sigma

Sigma (s) is a character of the Greek alphabet which is used in mathematical statistics to define standard deviation. The standard deviation indicates how tightly all the various examples are clustered around the mean in a set of data.

Six Sigma is a business method for improving quality by removing defects and their causes in business process activities. It concentrates on those outputs which are important to customers. The method uses various statistical tools to measure business processes. In technical terms, Six Sigma means that there are 3.4 defects per million events. The main goal is continuous improvement.

Six Sigma is carried out as projects. Most common type is the DMAIC method (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control). First, the project and the process to be improved are defined after which the performance of the process is measured. The data is then analyzed and bottle-necks and problems identified. After analysis, improvement program is defined and defects removed. This development program is controlled by a management group. After DMAIC circle it is time to define a new project.