Very Most Basic Things You Should Know About Six Sigma

The Very Most Basic Things you should know about Six Sigma: Including Key Words and Phrases Six Sigma is a business management strategy, originally developed by Motorola. Six Sigma seeks to identify and remove the causes of defects and errors in manufacturing and business processes. It uses statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization like Green Belts, Black Belts, etc. who are trained in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has declared financial targets such as cost reduction of x amount of dollars or profit increase of x dollars.

Six Sigma is a "Measure of Deviation" *It focuses on "Reducing Variation and Driving out Defects" *It sets priority based on "What is most important to the Customer" *Intensive use of "Statistical Tools are used to analyze and improve processes." A "defect" is anytime the deliverable doesn't meet the customer specifications. *The very most basic important thing that everyone knows about Six Sigma is DMAIC which stands for: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control Define - A serious problem is identified and a project team is formed *the problem should be a" Critical to Quality Customer Requirement" Measure-Gather data to quantify how the process performs today and set improvement goals Analyze - Identify the input variables that affect the problem the most Improve - Determine the solutions to controlling the variables Control - Designed solutions are implemented& standardized *Later a Sixth Step was added. but not everyone uses it Replicate - replicate the results and start a new project An acronym that anyone who has been around Six Sigma knows and uses frequently is COPQ It stands for "COST OF POOR QUALITY" Some examples of cost of poor quality are inspection cost, rework, warranty issues, etc. Vital needs of the customer are translated into "Critical to Satisfaction" requirements related to Quality, Delivery Time and Cost. Each sigma represents a 10 - 20 X quality improvement. Another word often used by Six Sigma knowledge based people is "BREAKTHROUGH" It is used when a "New level of performance is reached" they may say tell us about a "Breakthrough Project" or where your team has reached "Breakthrough Performance." A major focus of Six Sigma projects is that the problem must be " Measurable" In other words, you can't say the gap between the wall and floor is too wide. You must say

the gap must be 0.125" (1/8) with a tolerance of +/- 0.0625" (1/16) This is one area that must be corrected. You can't measure the cost of defects and rework if you don't first quantify what is expected and what is occurring.

Here are Some Six Sigma tools that may be used : FMEA(Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) We used FMEA on the paint process Pareto Analysis, shows the 20% of the inputs that cause 80% of the problems, or other words the vital few items on which to focus. Function Deployment Matrix, it tries to figure out what the customer thinks the defects are and has the customer rate each one to show how important each one is to them. Flow Charts, graphic representation of a process. Often team members are asked how the process actually works and then how they think it should work Cause & Effect Diagrams, used to identify and isolate the causes of problems (We are using this on the gap under the buildings) Six Sigma's should ask these questions every time. 4 Ws - What, Why, When and Where 5 Ms - Manpower, Machines, Methods, Materials, Measurements 5Ps - People, Provisions, Procedures, Place, Patrons Six Sigma represents six standard deviations around the mean(average) for process or product performance. That is a success rate of 99.999998%. Statistically speaking that is 0.002 failures out of One Million Opportunities However, the number everyone uses when talking about Six Sigma Strategy is 3.4 failures or defects out of one million opportunities The Motorola numbers are better in a practical sense because what Motorola has done is applied a factor to account for small changes in environmental conditions, different operators, and so on that would occur if you had time to study your process over a much longer period of time.

It is often referred to as 3.4 NPMO (Number of Defects per Million Opportunities) Just to clarify. 3.4 NPMO doesn't mean 3.4 defects out of say 1 million shelters. It means 3.4 defects out of 1 million opportunities for a defect to occur.