Some Basics About Six Sigma

 Every  businesses looks for STANDARDS in place.All your customers,stakeholders and Management expect  high standards and they are needed to achieve true excellence and create  your competitive edge in all aspects of business.

Six Sigma, , is a methodology to reduce business process cost and waste, improve quality and delivery performance, and assure that client requirements are better understood and met by management and staff. Irrespective of  organization's function quality management is criticalfor the management of qualityand the quality of management both. Six Sigma gives a more accurate statistical process performance metric than any other known system.

Incorporating Six Sigma the desire to reach perfaction and the  evolution in that direction could be  tracked and demonstrated. This could give an understanding that Quality Improvement is  an ongoing process and should not be thought of as a Static Goal.

To achieve Six Sigma Level or to come close to it it is essential to have Six Sigma Training  to all levels of personnel involved in improving business processes.Role of  higher or senior  management becomes very prominant.

Also the correlation between Six Sigma and ISO 9000 standards has been very clear .As without QMS or Quality Management System being in place and process of continual improvement being established Six Sigma Level could be only a distant dream.

To increase understanding of what Six Sigma is it , Executive Level Management Training is essential as this serves to understand how high-level organizations that have properly instituted Six Sigma ,have achieved remarkable and demonstrable results. All the  results are discussed and analyzed in the context of Six Sigma "best practices" implementation.

Today criteria is not only customer's satisfaction but to  exceed the custom's expectations. Six Sigma Training teaches a process that allows your organization  to maximize quality for your operation by utilizing a finely honed and quantifiable method, resulting in true Quality Improvement that too measurable.

Simply put, if we want to know what Six Sigma is all about we can say :Six Sigma is about generating and analyzing statistics; statistics that affect your profitability, and the products or services provided to your clients. With propability in Six Sigma representing the occurrence of 3.4 defects in one million opportunities. This ratio is generally considered as optimal, and with the proper investment of human resource time and capital, not only achievable, but essential to creativity, flexibility, success and growth.

We may cover more of Six Sigma details Like different levels of training,such as Green Belt,Black Belt,Master Black belt,Champion in next blog.

The Meaning of Six Sigma

Six sigma has different meanings to different people. Some believe it is all about reducing variation, while others believe it's strictly a quality improvement method. While reducing variation leads to quality improvement when the target is met, there are broader meanings to the term six sigma and “six sigma initiative”.

Many successful six sigma initiatives have reducing variation as one of the tools, but the broader meaning is to improve the business. Six sigma is used to improve the business systems as a whole, often having quality as an underlying edict.

For example, a hospital may use six sigma to improve the occupancy rate, improve bed turnover, reduce emergency room wait time, and reduce administrative check in cycle time. All of these initiatives have a little bit to do with quality, but have a different overall objective.

There are many tools included in the six sigma discipline. To name a few, there is the CT tree (critical to quality, cost, schedule, etc), cause and effect matrix, (FMEA) failure mode and effects analysis, DOE (design of experiments), hypothesis testing, analysis of means and standard deviation, advanced statistical analysis. There are many others within the discipline that a trained black belt will explore and use when necessary.

It is important for six sigma practitioners to understand the overall goals and objectives rather than picking projects that enable the use of six sigma tools. Once the goals and objectives are determined in the Define phase of the DMAIC model (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control), the six sigma green and black belts will methodically choose the tools necessary to solve the challenges.

Anyone that has been involved in any continuous improvement activity in the business world knows how far most businesses are from perfect. Most business problems do not involve advanced statistical analysis to solve. This fact is one reason many six sigma projects are solved very early. It isn't always a mystery that must be solved, but simple investigation and then execution.

Defining six sigma projects is the most important part of the initiative. Some projects may not really require six sigma tools. The goal is to solve business problems, using any improvement method. Although advanced tools many not be necessary, the DMAIC model works well even for simple projects.

Some black belts prefer to determine if the project is worthy of consideration to be classified a “six sigma project”. Some groups prefer to leave these “easy” projects for others while the black belts use their skills on more complex problems. While this may be fine for some groups, it also has the potential to distance the black belt from the real issues in the organization.

Many books describe the typical six sigma group as including sponsors, champions, master black belts, black belts, and green belts. Their respective roles are defined very clearly. While this may work well for very large corporations, many six sigma black belts are now being employed as a one person change agent. When a six sigma black belt is hired as the only change agent in the organization, rarely would a company wait six months for projects to be completed. Obviously, six sigma has a different meaning for this organization than a conglomerate with 100 black belts.

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