Business Method - Six Sigma

About

Six Sigma (6s) is an approach to improve the performance of business process.

where:

• sigma
• UTL = Upper Tolerance Limit. See Viz - Control Chart (Shewhart)
• LTL = Lower Tolerance Limit

The 6s strategy was developed by Motorola, Inc. in the mid-1980s to help boost the quality level of its products. After Motorola became the first company to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988, the ensuing media exposure introduced the 6s approach to many other manufacturing companies, most notably Allied Signal (now Honeywell International) and General Electric. Today, with thousands of companies around the world adopting this philosophy, 6s is arguably the most popular process improvement strategy ever devised.

6s has done an admirable job of organizing statistical techniques with a solid strategy (DMAIC : Define–Measure–Analyze–Improve–Control) for applying them in a logical manner to efficiently enhance process performance. However, all this has been done before in various forms. One of the reasons 6s is still around today—and the others aren’t—is because 6s evolved from its original focus on quality improvement to concentrate on profit improvement.

Therefore, to achieve 6s quality levels on the shop floor, forward-thinking companies must start at the beginning, with the design of the product and the process that will produce it. Improving a product in the design phase is almost always much easier (and much cheaper) than attempting to make improvements after it is in production. By preventing future problems, DFSS is definitely a much more proactive approach than the DMAIC strategy, which is mainly used to fix existing problems.

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