Six Sigma For Dummies
Overview
The fast and easy way to understand and implement Six Sigma
The world's largest and most profitable companies—including the likes of GE, Bank of America, Honeywell, DuPont, Samsung, Starwood Hotels, Bechtel, and Motorola—have used Six Sigma to achieve breathtaking improvements in business performance, in everything from products to processes to complex systems and even in work environments. Over the past decade, over $100 billion in bottom-line performance has been achieved through corporate Six Sigma programs. Yet, despite its astounding effectiveness, few outside of the community of Six Sigma practitioners know what Six Sigma is all about.
With this book, Six Sigma is revealed to everyone. You might be in a company that's already implemented Six Sigma, or your organization may be considering it. You may be a student who wants to learn how it works, or you might be a seasoned business professional who needs to get up to speed. In any case, this updated edition of Six Sigma For Dummies is the most straightforward, non-intimidating guide on the market.
- New and updated material, including real-world examples
- What Six Sigma is all about and how it works
- The benefits of Six Sigma in organizations and businesses
- The powerful "DMAIC" problem-solving roadmap
- Yellow, Green and Black—how the Six Sigma "belt" system works
- How to select and utilize the right tools and technologies
- Speaking the language of Six Sigma; knowing the roles and responsibilities; and mastering the statistics skills and analytical methods
Six Sigma For Dummies will become everyone's No. 1 resource for discovering and mastering the world's most famous and powerful improvement tool. Stephen Covey is spot-on when he says, "Six Sigma For Dummies is a book to be read by everyone."
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About The Author
Craig Gygi is Executive VP of Operations at MasterControl, a leading company providing software and services for best practices in automating and connecting every stage of quality/regulatory compliance, through the entire product life cycle. He is an operations executive and internationally recognized Lean Six Sigma thought leader and practitioner. Bruce Williams is Vice President of Pegasystems, the world leader in business process management. He is a leading speaker and presenter on business and technology trends, and is co-author of Six Sigma Workbook for Dummies, Process Intelligence for Dummies, BPM Basics for Dummies and The Intelligent Guide to Enterprise BPM. Neil DeCarlo was President of DeCarlo Communications.
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six sigma for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
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.
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Project Management
Six Sigma emphasizes the Control phase and planning for it because previous attempts at improving quality and business performance repeatedly demonstrated that process behavior is complex and fragile and that hard-earned gains slip away if the process is left to itself. A process is a system of events, activities, and feedback loops.
Project Management
At this point in your Six Sigma project, the intent of your brainstorming is to generate and capture a list of possible factors (the Xs) that may be influencing the key output (the Y) of your project.
The basic format for brainstorming is well known: You bring a group together and ask everyone to offer possible ideas on a topic.
Project Management
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.
Project Management
Six Sigma initiatives always have a long list of things to do to achieve a successful project. However, there are a few things you shouldn’t do to help get you to that finish line. Keep the following tips in mind while planning for your own Six Sigma.
Don’t deploy Six Sigma without a leader
Some organizations deploy Six Sigma without a designated, empowered deployment leader.
Project Management
Solving problems the Six Sigma way requires varying degrees of skill in applied statistics. Solving complex problems requires considerable statistical expertise, but dealing with moderate problems or routine work takes less skill.
In Six Sigma, the highest level of statistical skill is called Black Belt, the medium skill level is Green Belt, and the everyday level is Yellow Belt.
Project Management
Most companies want to achieve customer driven value with their Six Sigma initiative. They want customers to express both a strong demand for and a great satisfaction with their work.
The set of product or service features that customers truly desire is called the voice of the customer (VOC). Customers decide what they want; your job as the producer is to listen to the VOC.
Project Management
All process and product data in Six Sigma projects have variation; each repeated instance of any measured data point is different from the instance before. And as the collection of repeated measurements piles up, a shape begins to form.
Real data usually cluster around a central value, and the occurrence of data points farther and farther from the central value tapers off.
Project Management
A process in Six Sigma where material and information flow continuously is one that has minimal waste, so one way to identify waste and improve value is to look for disruptions to flow. Here are some indicators of poor flow:
Materials, products, or information being processed or moved in batches
Bottlenecks that choke the flow of a process
Stops and starts in the flow of the process
Uneven pacing of items through the process
Physical movement of items back and forth across a process
Differences or exceptions in the sequence or pacing of items through the process
Staging or prepping of batches of items for a subsequent step
As an example of perfect flow, and thus perfect value, imagine standing in the bakery aisle at the supermarket.
Project Management
It’s important for your Six Sigma initiative to know if your measurement system is effective. You need solid data to initiate your project and having a solid measurement system is key.
A computer disk drive manufacturer in the mid-1980s was experiencing a nagging problem with poor yields. The principle concern was that the sensitive magnetic medium coating the disks was in some way defective.
Project Management
The suite of general-purpose programs that come standard on most computers includes word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawing. These can be useful for Six Sigma purposes and generally come standard on any laptop or desktop. First marketed by Microsoft under the Office brand, people often substitute Microsoft’s product names for the general-purpose tools.
Project Management
Consider an example of a real situation where you can use a multi-vari study for a Sigma Six project. It can be used to pare down a large collection of potential factors and discover the “critical few” factors that truly drive the performance of the process.
A label supplier manufactures labels on rolls of adhesive backing strip.
Project Management
In Six Sigma, you want to define a process very precisely — down to the last detail of activity, resource, decision, dependency, and value. Sometimes, this level of definition is the only way you can sufficiently measure and analyze a process, leading to breakthrough improvements and, ultimately, effective controls.
Project Management
What should Six Sigma practitioners do with all the situations where more than one X influences a Y? You use multiple linear regression. After all, that kind of situation is more common than a single influencing variable is. When you work to create an equation that includes more than one variable — such as Y = f(X1, X2, .
The term Six Sigma comes from the statistical basis of the approach and methodology used to address quality concerns: the roll-up of characteristic behaviors and the natural increase in variation in each characteristic over the long term.
The sigma scale is a universal measure of how well a critical characteristic performs compared to its requirements.
Project Management
You must collect data for control charts for Six Sigma projects in a way that avoids a distorted or inaccurate view of the process performance — whether overly optimistic or too bleak. Using rational subgroups is a common way to assure that this distortion doesn’t happen.
A rational subgroup is a small set of measurements in which all the items in the subgroup are produced under as similar conditions as possible, typically within a relatively short time period — short enough that special causes are unlikely to occur within the subgroup.
Project Management
Carrying out a well-planned 2k factorial experiment for Six Sigma is easy — it’s like falling off a log. You just have to roll up your sleeves and get into the scientific trenches.
Randomize: Safeguard against unknown nuisance factors
Despite your best efforts, external factors beyond the control of your selected experiment variables may creep in and influence the outcome of your experiment.
Project Management
Simply changing a company’s belief system — its philosophy — from a goal post quality mentality to a Six Sigma “on target with minimal variation” mentality immediately and naturally begins to alter the behavior of employees for the better.
Whatever probabilities your process has in the short term will change in the long term.
Project Management
You don’t have to wait until your multi-vari data are collected to start creating the multi-vari chart for Six Sigma. Instead, you can build the chart, incrementally, adding more to it as you collect more data.Multi-vari charts can be drawn by hand; in fact, the process operators themselves can create them, providing those folks with a critical opportunity to invest themselves in the discovery of the root cause and the development of the solution.
Project Management
Seeking clarification is critical in Six Sigma and normal probability plots can help with this. When someone tells you that his or her data are normal, always respond with, “How normal are they?” No real-world data are perfectly normal. So the question you should be asking isn’t “Are the data normal?” but rather “How normal are the data?
Project Management
Often, you need to explore the relationship between two characteristics in a Six Sigma initiative. To do so, you use a scatter plot. Scatter plots get their name from their appearance — a scattered cluster of dots on a graph.
Scatter plots are a simple yet extremely powerful tool you can use to explore and quantify the relationship between two or more characteristics.
Project Management
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.
Project Management
A useful tool in Six Sigma initiatives is the Multi-Vari Chart and sampling plan. These can greatly help your project. Here’s the step-by-step procedure for pulling intermittent data from a running process:
Select or establish a continuous-type data measurement of process output performance.
This scale may be in units of time, dollars, inches, grams, but whatever it is, it must be a continuous data type.
Project Management
Multi-vari uses a specific data sampling plan, which graphically highlights the major variation cause in the output characteristic of your Six Sigma process while allowing the process to operate in its normal fashion and without requiring any process disruptions. The major cause of output variation is isolated into three categories:
Positional
Cyclical
Temporal
When you know which category of variation dominates the output of your process, you can concentrate on potential factors that fall under that category and eliminate factors that belong to the other categories.
Project Management
Originating from Japanese manufacturing, another format of process mapping has its advantages for a Six Sigma Initiative. It’s called a value stream map and often is abbreviated simply as VSM. A properly constructed VSM provides insight into the end-to-end process in ways that no other method does.
Here’s a quick rundown of the creation process:
Assemble a cross-functional team that has representatives from all areas of your process.
Project Management
Like putting two people back-to-back to see who’s taller, Sigma Six uses box and whisker plots (or just box plots) to directly compare two or more variation distributions. When you need to compare value distributions for multiple characteristics, few things are quicker to make or easier to interpret than a box and whisker plot.
Project Management
Both dot plots and histograms give you lots of information about the variation of a critical characteristic in a process for a Six Sigma initiative. A dot plot shows the scatter and grouping of a data from a single characteristic using (no surprise here) dots. A histogram takes the data from the dot plot and replaces the dots with bars.
Project Management
A behavior chart graphically shows how variation plays out over time in a Six Sigma initiative. Time/order can be a critical factor, especially when you’re trying to figure out the causes behind variation and changes in process behavior. Under normal conditions, a process or characteristic should behave normally.
Project Management
After you set the targeted level of improvement, you can then determine the financial benefit of doing the Six Sigma project and decide whether the project is worth your time. The Six Sigma effort is often aimed at cost reductions by eliminating waste (scrap, inefficiencies, excess materials, rework, and so on) that are increasing costs but not adding value.
Project Management
From a quality perspective, Six Sigma is defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities. This figure is called a Six Sigma level of quality. Sigma scores are thrown about so much that you definitely need to be comfortable understanding what they are and how they’re calculated. Basically, a sigma score tells you how many standard deviations can fit between the mean and specification limit of any process or specification.
Specifications are an important element in Six Sigma approaches. Before the 1800s, all products were manufactured one at a time by craftsmen. A gunsmith, for example, would shape a single barrel of a gun and then expertly carve a single wooden stock to match the barrel’s dimensions. The pieces fit together because the craftsman adjusted each part to match the other.
When defining a project, you get into the nuts and bolts of Six Sigma. Doing this step right is well worth your time because 50 percent of your project’s success depends on how well it’s defined!
Different people can be part of defining a potential project, including the following:
Champions
Belts
Process leaders
Functional managers or process owners
Note: Any employee can suggest a Six Sigma improvement project, but have one of the people in this list consider and sponsor the project.
Project Management
Besides control chart points that lie beyond the control limits in Six Sigma, other visual patterns can tell you that something out of the ordinary is happening to your process. These other patterns also indicate special cause variation.
Detecting special cause patterns, shifts, and drifts in a control chart is similar to detecting out-of-the-ordinary behavior in a pair of dice.
Project Management
Perhaps you’ve now convinced yourself that you have a viable Six Sigma project and that you can convince others to help make improvements. You know specifically what must be improved to make life better for everyone. Now the questions are “How much improvement do we need?” and “How much improvement can we make?
Project Management
A successful Six Sigma Initiative requires developing a SIPOC. SIPOC, pronounced sy-pok, is an acronym that stands for Suppliers-Inputs-Process-Outputs-Controls. The SIPOC is a powerful companion to a process map. With this tool, you build your first controlled and organized view of your work process and set the foundation for applying the breakthrough DMAIC strategy.
Project Management
A scatter plot tells you graphically how two characteristics are related, or correlated in a Six Sigma initiative. You can then use this correlation information to explore which factors and outputs affect each other and in what way.
Assess the amount of correlation
The amount of correlation in a scatter plot is determined by how closely or tightly the plotted points fit a drawn line.
Project Management
A Six Sigma initiative is a continuous series of projects — managing projects of various sizes and shapes cascading together predictably to create an unending stream of breakthrough improvements in business performance. These improvements occur one project at a time, and each project is an encapsulated world of Six Sigma activity unto itself.
Project Management
Your final step in getting your Six Sigma project started is to identify who has to approve the project. Although this task seems like an easy step that requires little effort, don’t take it lightly — it’s vitally important!
You’ve probably been involved in task force teams in the past where things were pushed through without enough thought given to who should be involved, provide support, or provide resources.
Project Management
The primary SPC tool for Six Sigma is the control chart — a graphical tracking of a process input or an output over time. In the control chart, these tracked measurements are visually compared to decision limits calculated from probabilities of the actual process performance. The visual comparison between the decision limits and the performance data allows you to detect any extraordinary variation in the process.
In Six Sigma, you make progress the old-fashioned way — one project at a time. In essence, projects are the unit of change; they define the collective effort by which most Six Sigma progress is accomplished. Projects represent — and in fact are — the level of granularity expressed to manage Six Sigma change, from a single process improvement to a large-scale business improvement effort.
Project Management
Yield and defect rate aren’t completely independent of each other for Six Sigma. When you have an overall process with a relatively low defect rate — say, a process that produces units with a DPU less than 0.10 (or 10 percent) — you can mathematically link the process defect rate to the overall process yield with the following equation:
where e in the equation is a mathematical constant equal to 2.
Project Management
In Six Sigma initiatives, you can make control charts for attribute data. Attribute data is data that can’t fit into a continuous scale but instead is chunked into distinct buckets, like small/medium/large, pass/fail, acceptable/not acceptable, and so on.
Although monitoring and controlling products, services, and processes with more sensitive continuous data is preferable, sometimes continuous data simply isn’t available, and all you have is less-sensitive attribute data.
The complementary measurement of yield for Six Sigma is defects. When a process or characteristic doesn’t perform within its specifications, it produces a noncompliant condition, called a defect. If your yield is 90 percent, you naturally must have 10 percent defects.
Defects equal failure
When a process or characteristic doesn’t perform within its specifications, it is considered defective; in other words, it produces a noncompliant condition called a defect.
You will need to be able to measure yield for your Six Sigma initiative. In the simplest terms, a process or characteristic can either meet or not meet its specification. Just as when you harvest the fruit from an apple tree, the yield of a characteristic or process relates to how much good stuff — performance within specifications — you get out.
Project Management
Data mining is just what its name implies — it’s the labor of digging and sorting through Six Sigma data for clues to where the improvement gems may lie. Sometimes you have to go through a lot of dirt to find the gems. Searching for clues in data is not much different.
Observational studies
Where do you begin your search for improvement gems?
Project Management
Mistake-proofing, or Poka-Yoke (pronounced POH-kuh YOH-kay) as it’s known in Japan, is an action you take in Six Sigma to remove or significantly lower the opportunity for an error or to make the error so obvious that allowing it to reach the customer is almost impossible.
Poka-Yoke is one of the simplest tools to master; it’s very consistent with the fundamental aims and philosophy of Six Sigma, and it has wide applicability in manufacturing, engineering, and transactional processes.
Project Management
The full deployment and implementation of a Six Sigma initiative in an organization requires the collective participation of numerous people, each of whom is responsible for fulfilling specific roles and obligations at both the managerial and technical levels. Most often, these people are drawn from within the ranks of the company and are specially trained to the requisite skills.
Project Management
Like in most other endeavors, time spent planning for Six Sigma is rewarded with better results in a shorter period of time. Planning 2k factorial experiments follows a simple pattern: choosing the factors you want to experiment with, establishing the high and low levels for those factors, and creating the coded design matrix.
Taking measures for Six Sigma projects to enable and encourage a process to follow a standard — a standard sequence, a standard method of handling, a standard set of equipment settings, and so on — must become the norm if you want to keep performance at an improved level.
And your organization’s management must change the culture so that employees view these standards as process essentials to be embraced and even honored rather than as restrictive shackles that may be okay to resist.
Project Management
Confidence intervals give you a way of quantifying how much variation will appear in repeated measurements and statistical calculations for Six Sigma. Knowing how to create confidence intervals, you’ll be able to tell your boss, “With 99.7 percent certainty, our average pen diameter will be within our customer’s requirement.
The primary Statistical Process Control (SPC) tool for Six Sigma initiatives is the control chart — a graphical tracking of a process input or an output over time. In the control chart, these tracked measurements are visually compared to decision limits calculated from probabilities of the actual process performance.
Project Management
If you apply control charting as a part of your Six Sigma process control plan, you can use the control chart itself to trigger action or to leave things as they are based on what the control chart tells you. Sample data, also called subgroup data, is collected from the process characteristic in which you’re interested.
At the business level, Six Sigma projects are the players in the overall game plan of a breakthrough performance improvement initiative, DMAIC. The business perspective is that a Six Sigma project is the agent of action that executes the business strategy and returns the results.
Every Six Sigma project follows a standardized and systematic method named for each of its phases: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control, and known by its acronym, DMAIC.
Project Management
All data aren’t created equal. As you begin your Six Sigma quest to organize your data, you first need to know what type of performance data you have. Just as knowing what the fish are biting tells you which lure to use, knowing what kind of data you’re dealing with tells you which tools to use. There are two important data categories: attribute and continuous.
Project Management
Six Sigma benefits are derived from a series of projects that require managing: big projects, little projects, projects within a single department, projects that cross departments, projects inside companies, and projects that even cross company boundaries.
The skills and tools required to manage a Six Sigma project are similar to those required to manage other types of projects; you need to leverage technology for managing the complexity of people, change, and information.
Project Management
All of Six Sigma can be summarized with what’s called the breakthrough equation — one general-purpose equation that shouldn’t intimidate even the least mathematically inclined: Y = f(X) + ε, where
Y is the outcome(s) or result(s) you desire or need.
X represents the inputs, factors, or pieces necessary to create the outcome(s).
Project Management
What happens when you take repeated samples from the same population? This idea is important when you use the central limit theorem for Six Sigma. Imagine flipping a coin ten times and counting the number of heads you get. The laws of probability say that you have a 50-50 chance of getting heads on any single toss.
Project Management
Sometimes in a Six Sigma project, you will be faced with confidence intervals and proportions. When you calculate the number of successes out of a certain number of attempts — like “four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum” — you can write this proportion (p) mathematically as
where y is the number of successes and n is the total number of attempts or trials.
Project Management
Because samples are accessible, samples and confidence intervals are the primary data tool for understanding a business or processing Six Sigma performance situations. But samples can never give you an exact measure of what is going on in the underlying population. They’re inherently fuzzy! How sure can you be that your sample accurately enough reflects what is actually going on in the underlying population?
Project Management
You may be wondering whether a solid strategy for experimentation even exists. Lucky for you, we have just that. Six Sigma uses a reliable approach to experimentation that helps you do the following:
Efficiently accumulate information about a process or system
Provide valid insights, including knowledge regarding variable interactions
Quantify the amount of knowledge discovered about a system as well as the amount of knowledge that remains unknown (the ε)
The experimental approach you use in Six Sigma incorporates the best practices from the various disciplines of science.
Project Management
There will most definitely be times when you will need to work with the Z transformation in Six Sigma. How often do you come across a process or product characteristic that has an average of 0 and a standard deviation of 1? Not very often, if ever. So where’s the usefulness in the standard normal distribution and the standard normal probability tables?
Project Management
The problem statement serves several purposes in a Six Sigma project. First, it significantly clarifies the current situation by specifically identifying the problem and its severity, location, and financial impact. It also serves as a great communication tool, helping to get buy-in and support from others. When problem statements are well written, people readily grasp and understand what you’re trying to accomplish.
Project Management
After you know what your problem statement is and how much improvement you’re aiming for with Six Sigma, you’re ready to craft your objective statement. Your objective statement spells out the specific, quantifiable amount of improvement planned above the baseline performance that was indicated in the problem statement.
Project Management
After you’ve homed in on the problem area, you need to define the business case for the Six Sigma project approach you’re considering. Writing the business case helps you describe or characterize the issues and estimate the potential value of improvement projects. At this stage, you aren’t looking to define the project but rather to identify the value.
Project Management
Six Sigma is so appealing to managers because it delivers business management results. Managers need to see a return on investment, commitment, accountability, transparency, and a clear path to success. Six Sigma provides all these things.
Clear value proposition and ROI
Six Sigma is characterized by an unwavering focus on business return on investment (ROI).
Most of the time, your Six Sigma project is charged with improving an existing process. This is made much easier with process intelligence tools. You’re not beginning with a blank page; your work is based on the current process. So before you charge off and just start designing the world’s greatest new process, you must characterize and understand the existing process by using process intelligence tools.
Project Management
Process intelligence tools give you all the information you need to understand what’s happening with process behavior and performance in a Six Sigma Initiative. These tools are vitally important because they provide visibility into the bottom-line results of your projects and programs and give you the necessary information to affect change to help your initiative progress in the right direction.
Project Management
The simplest capability index for Six Sigma is called CPor short term capability index. It compares the width of a two-sided specification to the effective short-term width of the process.
Short-term capability index (CP)
Determining the width between the two rigid specification limits is easy; it is simply the distance between the upper specification limit (USL) and the lower specification limit (LSL).
Project Management
Simple linear regression is becoming a common activity. Any Sigma Six practitioner with Microsoft Excel, for example, can take data from an X and a Y variable and almost immediately create a scatter plot of the two. Then with just a couple of clicks, the program automatically derives the fitted line for your data.
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 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.
In a perfect world, there is no error — the ε in the Six Sigma breakthrough equation. Unfortunately, Six Sigma managers are faced with managing risk. The input Xs and transfer function f would completely describe the output Y. In this world, weather forecasts would be exactly right, financial stock charts would display perfectly smooth and predictable trends, and a card player’s selected strategy would determine the outcome of the game.
In Six Sigma terms, leverage is the ability to apply effort toward the critical few Xs that have the greatest impact on your desired Y. You have to expend a little effort to find the leverage, but when you do, it catapults you over your problems and through the obstacles that stand between you and your goal.
The vast majority of leverage, or impact power, in creating any desired outcome comes from a surprisingly small number of contributors.
Project Management
A fundamental element of the Six Sigma approach is the ability to recognize determinism. If you’re like most people in Western society, you’re results-oriented. You ask questions such as “How did it turn out?”, “What finally happened?”, “What was the final score?”, “How long did it take?”, and “What’s the bottom line?
Project Management
The principle of measurement is one of the fundamental tenets of Six Sigma. You may boast lots of knowledge about your processes, but until you translate that knowledge into numbers through measurement, you’re bound to the world of gut-feel, guessing, and marginal improvement.
Likewise, you may work very hard to bring significant resources to a performance problem or improvement goal, but without measuring your Ys and Xs, your ability to improve will be weak.
Project Management
In general, when planning for Six Sigma, variation is undesirable because it creates uncertainty in your ability to produce a desired outcome. Professional results, in anything, demand consistency. In the world of business and organizational life, the goal is to produce a work product or deliver a service in a predictable manner.
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.
The sole purpose of Six Sigma is to increase productivity and using the four domains of activity can help achieve better efficiency. You can apply Six Sigma to four areas, or domains of activity:
Thinking for breakthrough: The domain of thinking focuses on improving the capacity and efficiency of every employee.
Project Management
A Six Sigma Initiative can be a complicated compilation of projects that may need your constant attention. Use these six tips as guidelines to keep your initiative on track for success!
Target tangible results from your Six Sigma projects
Typically, Six Sigma leads organizations to reduce their costs by as much as 20 to 30 percent of revenue.
The number one tool in the Six Sigma practitioner’s belt is the statistical analysis package. It’s the single most-used tool, and it’s critical to advancing the Six Sigma project from the M (measurement and characterization) phase through A and I (analysis and improvement) and getting you into the C (control) phase.
Six Sigma is big, and it can seem almost daunting at times. Don’t be afraid to seek help. Although you may be blazing new trails through your own life and organization, thousands of people have forged similar trails before you. You have many, many resources for all kinds of help on every Six Sigma subject imaginable.
Project Management
Six Sigma and Lean are different but closely related improvement methodologies. Using elements from both can help gain synergy for your project. Six Sigma is a rigorous project-driven approach to reducing variance and eliminating defects in processes. Lean, meanwhile, is fundamentally about helping people do more with less — delivering more customer value with less waste.
The DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) project method is a formalized problem-solving process of Six Sigma. It’s made-up of five steps to apply to any procedure of a business to improve effectiveness.
Define: Set the context and objectives for your improvement project.
Measure: Determine the baseline performance and capability of the process or system you’re improving.
Project Management
You don’t start a Six Sigma program by launching right into a bunch of projects; you will need to follow the five stages. Six Sigma is strong stuff; you move deliberately and prescriptively through distinct phases. A Six Sigma initiative occurs in the following five major stages:
You initialize Six Sigma by establishing goals and installing infrastructure.
Six Sigma action occurs on two levels: the managerial and the technical. At the managerial level, a Six Sigma initiative includes many units, people, technologies, projects, schedules, and details to be managed and coordinated. It also involves developing many plans, taking many actions, and completing a lot of specialized work.
What’s poor quality really costing your business? Compare the flawed traditional perspective and the Six Sigma perspective on specifications and their relation to quality and costs. Poor quality is detrimental to any business.
Traditionally, companies have thought that quality is like kicking football field goals; as long as the ball goes between the uprights, you get the full three points regardless of whether it goes straight down the middle or it hits the upright and bounces in.
The Six Sigma scale shows how well a vital feature performs compared to its requirements. The higher the sigma score, the more efficient the feature is. This table shows the universal Six Sigma scale:
Sigma Level (Z)
Defects per Million Opportunities (DPMO)
Percent Defects (%)
Percent Success (Yield %)
Capability (CP)
1
691,462
69
31
0.
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
Project Management
2k full factorial experiments give you a powerful jump-start into the world of improvement through DOE for Six Sigma projects. But really, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. As you gain experience, you want to discover how to address more advanced topics.
Curvature: The assumption of 2kexperiments is that the effects of your experimental factors are linear.
For Six Sigma, 5S can be invaluable for reducing waste. High-performing processes and workplaces are always characterized by organization and cleanliness. The whole point is to reduce or keep out waste, and the method that helps you with that is called 5S.
The process behind 5S began decades ago in Japan as a means of immediately engaging frontline process teams in the daily work of improvement.
Project Management
You will need to understand long term variation to launch a successful Six Sigma initiative. When underlying disturbances are added to the natural short-term variation, the overall combination is called the long-term variation of the process. In many cases, it’s written with a simple LT notation.
If you look at an extended process behavior graph, you’ll notice something besides pure random variation is going on.
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.
Project Management
When enacting a Six Sigma initiative, you will undoubtedly encounter short term variation. Short-term variation is purely random. Like rolling a pair of dice, you can’t predict what the next output value will be. If you could, Las Vegas would be bankrupt in a week!
Suppose you monitor a characteristic of a product or process — say, the volume of inbound calls per hour at a customer call center — over an extended period.
Project Management
Distribution is the statistical term that describes the relative likelihood of observing values for a variable factor. When you think of a Six Sigma initiative and the critical performance characteristics of a product or service — either output Ys or input Xs — you should begin thinking of them as distributions.
Project Management
Most people use computers to do their work, and Six Sigma is naturally computational and collaborative, so manual tools have limited use. But with all the computer programs available — and the need for accuracy, sharing, and control — some situations support using a pen or marker, for a couple of reasons:
It’s fast and free-form.
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