Six Sigma and Its Techniques

Six Sigma and Its Techniques

Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement that was presented in 1986 by Bill Smith & Mikel J Harry while working at Motorola. Jack Welch used it for the first time as a part of his business approach in 1995 at General Electric.

Six Sigma  helps to improve the the quality of the resultant product from a process by identifying and removing the defecctive sub-processes within it. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly realistic and statistical methods. It then goes on to create an infrastructure that consists of people who are experts at these methods. Eevry Six Sigma project within an organisation has different results to be obtained and as such the steps followed are also different. These steps may aim at reducing process cycle time, or pollution or   costs, but always targeting increased customer satisfaction and increased profits.

Six Sigma became familiar in 1998 when GE announced to the world that it had made  a  savings of $350 million. Later this number was to increase to more than $1 billion. Six Sigma has tools enough to find its uses in almost all types and size of organisations.

The Techniques Used by Six Sigma

Six Sigma uses various techniques in the methodology that is presented to its clients. The techniques used by Six Sigma include – DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control), and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design , Verify).

DMAIC – The Define phase is to know what processes are essentials for meeting the desired goals. The Measure phase goes on to record and evaluate efficencies of those involved. The Analyse phase clarifys the goals to be achieved by examining the data on hand critically. The Improve phase betters existing processes to meet customer requirements. The last phase Control is to create checks for continuous improvements in the processes.

DMADV – The define phase i.e. ‘D’ refers to the needs of the customer in relation to a specific product or service. The ‘M’ refers to meassuring the needs of the customer, the ‘A’ refers to analysing areas where the products of the organisation will be better aligned to customer needs. The second ‘D’ here is specifying the design of the product for the customer and last of all the ‘V’ stands for verification that all the customer demands are being met.