Bruce Williams

To apply Six Sigma to your business and produce the best results, you need to understand what Six Sigma is, the principles of Six Sigma, and the DMAIC problem-solving method. The correct tools and use of the Six Sigma scale and methods will keep your data dependable and reusable.What is Six Sigma?Generally, Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools that help businesses improve their processes.

To understand how to apply Lean in any organization, you should know the basics: the principles, the definitions of value and waste, how to lead effectively, and how to define and improve the value stream. You should also be aware of how a Lean leader thinks and acts.What is Lean?Lean is a customer-centric methodology used to continuously improve any process through the elimination of waste in everything you do; it is based on the ideas of “Continuous Incremental Improvement” and “Respect for People.

A cause-and-effect matrix — sometimes called a C&E matrix for short — helps you discover which factors affect the outcomes of your Six Sigma initiative. It provides a way of mapping out how value is transmitted from the input factors of your system (the Xs) to the process or product outputs (the Ys). With these relationships visible and quantified, you can readily discover the most-influential factors contributing to value.

Generally, Six Sigma is a problem-solving methodology that helps enhance business and organizational operations. It can also be defined in a number of other ways: A quality level of 3.4 defects per million opportunities A rate of improvement of 70 percent or better A data-driven, problem-solving methodo

FMEA can be very valuable for identifying failure modes in a Six Sigma Initiative. After scoring the severity of the possible effects, your cross-functional FMEA team brainstorms potential causes of the identified failure mode. Think of causes for the failure mode, not for the effect. In the pizza example, you need to think of causes for why the phone is answered on or after the fifth ring, not causes for why a customer hangs up or why a customer becomes disgruntled.

Failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) is a tool you can use in Six Sigma to quantify and prioritize risk within a process, product, or system and then track actions to mitigate that risk. It’s valuable as a method for identifying and prioritizing which critical few factors you must address to improve the process in your DMAIC project.

To begin understanding the technical side of Six Sigma, you have to first answer a seemingly straightforward question: What is quality? A traditional and widely held definition of quality is Quality = compliance with specifications The following mental experiment walks through the traditional definition of quality and highlights why measuring quality this way is a flawed approach.

The value stream includes all of the activities, materials, people, and information that must flow and come together to provide your customer the value they want, when they want it and how they want it. You identify the value stream on a value-stream map, using specific icons. You improve the value stream by following the Plan-Do-Check-Act process (sometimes called the Plan-Do-Study-Act process).

Six Sigma is based on a handful of basic principles, and these principles create the entire Six Sigma arrangement. Here are Six Sigma’s fundamental principles: Y=f(X) + ε: All outcomes and results (theY) are determined by inputs (theXs) with some degree of uncertainty (å). To change or improve results (the Y), you have to focus on the inputs (theXs), modify them, and control them.