Can anyone explain in simple terms six sigma?

Question

I have read lots of different facts but find them a bit confusing!

Answer 1

fad-of-the-month member.

It got a lot of undeserved press because the CEO of GE liked the book after it (properly) languished for years... then Home Depot tried to implement it and found it ineffective... of course, it is costing them more than $200 million to buy out the former GE exec they hired as their CEO who blindly tried to implement it and flatlined the stock over his tenure... it adds layers of inefficient bean counters to any operation that values creativity... it seeks to remove inefficiency but in fact, dooms the company to even more.

Here is one of it's brilliant cornerstones... "measure your results". Wow, that's earth-shattering.

Answer 2

Hello DGC

People often view Six Sigma as a rigorous statistical quality control mechanism that reduces defects to 3.4 in a million opportunities. Rather, it can more broadly be thought of as a way of using statistics to understand customer needs better and to manage business processes to meet those needs.

Translating customer expectations and experiences into a language of numbers is the first step in measuring and improving our processes. In statistical terms, customers expect the mean, or our target for performance. Mean is also referred to as the arithmetic “average” in common language. What customers actually experience, however, is known as variation from the mean. For example, how often do we notice timely delivery from a thirty-minute pizza delivery shop? In contrast, we always take note of delayed deliveries, or that shop’s variation.

If we can measure process variations that cause defects, defined as unacceptable deviation from the mean or target, we can work towards systematically managing variation to eliminate those defects. Six Sigma provides a methodology to achieve this.

Hope it helps you understand the concept in simple terms...

With warm regards,

SKS

Answer 3

The disadvantage to the normal person is that the 'average' keeps rising, it is why companies use it as part of 'continual improvement' programmes. when you identify a weak area of performance you analyse and eradicate the fault (can be applied to sacking people.) In theory this leads to improved customer satisfaction, in practice this new level becomes the norm. Very good when applied to physical objects such as the quality of a car. Not very good when used to optimise staff levels or to identify people qualities, in this regard it is a form of eugenics

Answer 4

It's the probability of a value lying within six times the standard deviation on a normal distribution.

In simple terms, it's 99.997% probability of occurence.

Cheers.

Answer 5

http://www.isixsigma.com/sixsigma/six_sigma.asp

I hope this helps.