Six Sigma at many organizations simply means a measure of quality that strives for near perfection.

Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process -- from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. The statistical representation of Six Sigma describes quantitatively how a process is performing. To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications. A Six Sigma opportunity is then the total quantity of chances for a defect. Process sigma can easily be calculated using a Six Sigma calculator. The fundamental objective of the Six Sigma methodology is the implementation of a measurementbased strategy that focuses on process improvement and variation reduction through the application of Six Sigma improvement projects. This is accomplished through the use of two Six Sigma sub-methodologies: DMAIC and DMADV. The Six Sigma DMAIC process (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is an improvement system for existing processes falling below specification and looking for incremental improvement. The Six Sigma DMADV process (define, measure, analyze, design, verify) is an improvement system used to develop new processes or products at Six Sigma quality levels. It can also be employed if a current process requires more than just incremental improvement. Both Six Sigma processes are executed by Six Sigma Green Belts and Six Sigma Black Belts, and are overseen by Six Sigma Master Black Belts. According to the Six Sigma Academy, Black Belts save companies approximately $230,000 per project and can complete four to 6 projects per year. General Electric, one of the most successful companies implementing Six Sigma, has estimated benefits on the order of $10 billion during the first five years of implementation. GE first began Six Sigma in 1995 after Motorola and Allied Signal blazed the Six Sigma trail. Since then, thousands of companies around the world have discovered the far reaching benefits of Six Sigma. Globalization and instant access to information, products and services have changed the way our customers conduct business old business models no longer work. Today's competitive environment leaves no room for error. We must delight our customers and relentlessly look for new ways to exceed their expectations. This is why Six Sigma Quality has become a part of our culture.

What is Six Sigma?

First, what it is not. It is not a secret society, a slogan or a clich. Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps us focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. Why "Sigma"? The word 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 GE it is now the way we work in everything we do and in every product we design. 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 the center of GE's universe: they define quality. They expect performance,

reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct transaction processing and more. In every attribute that influences customer perception, we know that just being good is not enough. Delighting our customers is a necessity. Because if we don't do it, someone else will!

...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.

...the Employee Leadership Commitment

People create results. Involving all employees is essential to GE's quality approach. GE is committed to providing opportunities and incentives for employees to focus their talents and energies on satisfying customers. All GE employees are trained in the strategy, statistical tools and techniques of Six Sigma quality. Training courses are offered at various levels: Quality Overview Seminars: basic Six Sigma awareness. Team Training: basic tool introduction to equip employees to participate on Six Sigma teams. Master Black Belt, Black Belt and Green Belt Training: in-depth quality training that includes high-level statistical tools, basic quality control tools, Change Acceleration Process and Flow technology tools. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Training: prepares teams for the use of statistical tools to design it right the first time.

Quality is the responsibility of every employee. Every employee must be involved, motivated and knowledgeable if we are to succeed

To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. An "opportunity" is defined as a chance for nonconformance, or not meeting the required specifications. This means we need to be nearly flawless in executing our key processes. Six Sigma is a vision we strive toward and a philosophy that is part of our business culture.

Key Concepts of Six Sigma

At its core, Six Sigma revolves around a few key concepts.
Critical to Quality: Defect: Process Capability: Variation: Stable Operations: Design for Six Sigma: Attributes most important to the customer Failing to deliver what the customer wants What your process can deliver What the customer sees and feels Ensuring consistent, predictable processes to improve what the customer sees and feels Designing to meet customer needs and process capability

Our Customers Feel the Variance, Not the Mean

Often, our inside-out view of the business is based on average or mean-based measures of our recent past. Customers don't judge us on averages, they feel the variance in each transaction, each product we ship. Six Sigma focuses first on reducing process variation and then on improving the process capability. Customers value consistent, predictable business processes that deliver world-class levels of quality. This is what Six Sigma strives to produce.

Six Sigma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the 1960s rhythm and blues band, see Sigma 6
Six Sigma is a quality management program to achieve "six sigma" levels of quality. It was pioneered by Motorola in the mid-1980s by Bob Galvin, who succeeded his father and the founder of Motorola as head of the company, Paul Galvin, and by Motorola engineer Bill Smith. It has since spread to many other manufacturing companies, including GE, Honeywell, Raytheon, and Microsoft. However, it can be applied wherever the control of variation is desired. In recent years, it has begun to branch out into the service industry, and in 2000, Fort Wayne, Indiana became the first city to implement the program in a city government. Some, claiming that Six Sigma's impact has not yet been fully realized, advocate an open source approach so that the principles of Six Sigma might be more widely adopted. In statistics, sigma refers to the standard deviation of a set of data; "six sigma", therefore, refers to six standard deviations. Mathematically, assuming that defects occur according to a standard normal distribution, this corresponds to approximately two quality failures per billion parts manufactured. In practical application of the Six Sigma methodology, however, the rate is taken to be 3.4 per million; see below. Initially, many believed that such high process reliability was

impossible, and three sigmas (67,000 defects per million opportunities, or DPMO) was considered acceptable. However, market leaders have measurably reached six sigmas in numerous processes.

Contents
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1 Why six? 2 DMAIC 3 DMADV 4 See also 5 External links

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Why six?
According to the graph of the standard normal distribution, only two billionths of the normal curve falls beyond six standard deviations, in contrast to the value of 3.4 millionths publicized by Six Sigma promoters. Confusingly, that value corresponds to precision within 4.5 standard deviations, reflecting a 1.5 standard deviation "shift". This shift is used to account for model inaccuracies, since defects in manufacturing processes do not always correspond to the normal distribution. Instead, processes tend to "drift" with time, causing the majority of error to fall on one side of the normal distribution and as a result, a higher defect rate than 3.4 DPMO if no shift were used. With Six Sigma methodology, however, if the process drifts by 1.5 standard deviations, the level of quality will remain within 3.4 DPMO. However, the 1.5 sigma shift assumption is not without its critics. Donald J. Wheeler, a respected quality professional, labels it "goofy", arguing that it is misapplied in practice and that it is probably inaccurate anyway. Often, implementers of Six Sigma simply add 1.5 "sigmas" to their sigma calculation, transforming a 4.5 sigma process (3.4 DPMO) into a 6.0 sigma process. But this reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of the shift. If short-term data is used (data that does not reflect potential process drift), 1.5 sigmas should be subtracted from the final sigma calculation to account for the potential drift. Thus, achieving 3.4 DPMO using short term data reflects a three sigma process, not six sigma, when used to reflect the long-term failure rate. Alternatively, if longterm data is used to make the sigma calculations, the process drift will have already been accounted for, and no additions or subtractions to the sigma calculation are necessary. The other common objection is that the choice of a shift of 1.5 sigmas is too arbitrary and probably inaccurate. Some suggest that the 1.5 sigma shift was implemented for marketing reasons, so that the program could be named Six Sigma instead of "4.5 Sigma" without setting the unrealistic goal of two defects per billion. However, according to original training material used at Motorola in 1985, the point at which a shift became detectable with a sample size of 4 was 1.5 standard deviations, suggesting that the number was not arbitrarily selected. In practice, the principle of six standard deviations of quality between the upper and lower specification limits is often not applied with mathematical rigor. Instead, Six Sigma is seen as a methodology to generally minimize defects. It is used in this way in non-manufacturing environments, where it serves as an analogy to manufacturing processes and is not used for

statistical distributions. Similarly, the frequent misuse of the 1.5 shift assumption in manufacturing processes is a reflection of a similar attitude in industrial applications as well.

The +/-1.5 Sigma Drift Everyone with a Six Sigma program knows about the +/-1.5 sigma drift of a process mean, experienced by all processes. What this is saying is that if we are manufacturing a product that is 100 +/- 3 cm (97 - 103cm), over time, it may drift down to 98.5 104.5 or up to 95.5-101.5. Something that might be of concern to our customers. So where does the "+/-1.5" come from? The +/-1.5 shift was introduced by Mikel Harry as most people are aware. Where did he get it? Harry refers to a paper written in 1975 by Evans, "Statistical Tolerancing: The State of the Art. Part 3. Shifts and Drifts". The paper is about tolerancing. That is how the overall error in an assembly is effected by the errors in components. Evans refers to a paper by Bender in 1962, "Benderizing Tolerances A Simple Practical Probablity Method for Handling Tolerances for Limit Stack Ups". He looked at the classical situation with a stack of disks and how the overall error in the size of the stack, relates to errors in the individual disks. Based on "probability, approximations and experience", he suggests: v = 1.5 SQRT(var X) What has this got to do with monitoring the myriad of processes that people are concerned about? Very little. Harry then takes things a step further. Imagine a process where 5 samples are taken every half hour and plotted on a control chart. Harry considered the "instantaneous" initial 5 samples as being "short term" (Harrys n=5) and the samples throughout the day as being "long term" (Harrys g=50 points). Because of random variation in the first 5 points, the mean of the initial sample is different to the overall mean. Harry derived a relationship between the short term and long term capability, using the equation above, to produce a capability shift or "Z shift" of 1.5 ! Over time, the original meaning of "short term" and "long term" has been changed to result in "long term" drifting means. Harry has clung tenaciously to the "1.5" but over the years, its derivation has been modified. In a recent note from Harry "We employed the value of 1.5 since no other empirical information was available at the time of reporting." In other words, 1.5 has now become an empirical rather than theoretical value. A further softening from Harry: " the 1.5 constant would not be needed as an approximation". Despite this, industry has fixed on the idea that it is impossible to keep processes on target. No matter what is done, process means will drift by +/-1.5 sigma. In other words, suppose a process has a target value of 10.0, and control limits work out to be, say, 13.0 and 7.0. "Long term" the mean will drift to 11.5 (or 8.5), with control limits changing to 14.5 and 8.5. This is nonsense. The simple truth is that any process where the mean changes by 1.5 sigma or any other amount, is not in statistical control. Such a change can often be detected by a trend on a control chart. A process that is not in control is not predictable. It may begin to produce defects, no matter where specification limits have been set. World Class Quality means "On target with minimum variation" .

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DMAIC
Basic methodology to improve existing processes

Define out of tolerance range. Measure key internal processes critical to quality. Analyze why defects occur. Improve the process to stay within tolerance. Control the process to stay within goals.

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DMADV
Basic methodology of introducing new processes.

Define the process and where it would fail to meet customer needs! Measure and determine if process meets customer needs. Analyze the options to meet customer needs. Design in changes to the process to meet customers needs. Verify the changes have met customer needs.