SIX SIGMA

SIX SIGMA

Six Sigma is one of the quality management systems

Six Sigma is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliché.

Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps organisations focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services.

The word sigma is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection.

The central idea behind six sigma is that if you can measure how many ‘defects’ you have in a process, you can systematically, figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to zero defects as possible.

Six Sigma has changed the DNA of General Electric-It is now the way they work in everything they do and in every product they design.

GE began moving towards a focus on quality in the late 1980s.

The start of the company's journey opened its culture to ideas from everyone, everywhere, decimated the bureaucracy and made boundary less behaviour a reflexive, natural part of their culture thereby creating the learning environment that lead to six sigma.

Six sigma also involves embedding quality thinking-process thinking-across every level and in every operation of organisation.

Six sigma should therefore define how organization work and should set the stage for making its customers feel six sigma.

GENERAL ELECTRIC EVOLUTION TOWARDS SIX SIGMA

1.Six Sigma Quality-The Road To Customer Impact.

2. Key Strategy Initiatives.

Quality Management.

Productivity and Globalisation

3. Change Acceleration Process

Increase Success and Acceleration change

4.Productivity/Best Practices

Looking outside GE.

5.Work-out/Town Meeting

Empowerment and Bureaucracy busting .

KEY ELEMENTS OF QUALITY IN SIX SIGMA

There are three key elements of quality-customer ,process and employee. Everything we do to remain a world-class, quality company focuses on these three essential elements.

The Customer-Delighting Customers.

• Customers are key in every organisation.

• They define quality

• They expect performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct transaction process.

The process-Outside-In Thinking

• Quality requires us to look at our business from the customer's perspective, not ours.

• In other words, we must look at our processes from the outside-in.

• By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer's needs and processes, we can discover what they are seeing and feeling.

• With this knowledge we can identify areas where we can add significant value or improvement from their perspective.

EMPLOYEE LEADERSHIP AND COMMITMENT

• People create results.

• Involving all employees is essential to Quality approach

• Organisations should be committed to providing opportunities and incentives for employees to focus their talents and energies on satisfying customers.

• All employees should be trained on strategy, statistical tools and techniques of six sigma quality.

SIX SIGMA STRATEGY

• To achieve six sigma quality, a process must produce not more than 3.4defects per million opportunities.

• An opportunity is defined as a chance for non conformance or not meeting the required specifications.

• This means we need to be nearly flawless in executing our key processes.

• Six Sigma should be a vision that organizations should strive towards and a philosophy that is part of their business.