Six Sigma is all about delivering business excellence, higher customer satisfaction, and superior profits by dramatically improving every process in an enterprise from financial to operational to production. Six Sigma has become a darling of a wide spectrum of industries, from health care to insurance to telecommunications to software and now into education system.
What is Six Sigma?
It is important to recall that every customer always values consistent and predicable services and/or products with near zero defects. Therefore they experience the variation and not the mean. Mean is their expectation or our target.
If we can measure process variations that cause defects i.e. unacceptable deviation from the mean or target, we can work towards systematically managing the variation to eliminate defects.
How does Six Sigma work?The driving force behind any Six Sigma project comes from its primary focus - "bringing breakthrough improvements in a systematic manner by managing variation and reducing defects". This requires us to ask tougher questions, raise the bar significantly, and force people to think out of the box and to be innovative. The objective is to stretch, stretch mentally and not physically. To make this journey successful there is a methodology(s) to support Six Sigma implementations.
There are 2 potential scenarios - (a) there is already an existing process(s) that is working "reasonably" well and (b) there is no process at all. A bad process is as good as no process.
Scenario (a) focuses on significant process improvements and requires use of DMAIC:
- Define process goals in terms of key critical parameters (i.e. critical to quality or critical to production) on the basis of customer requirements or Voice Of Customer (VOC)
- Measure the current process performance in context of goals
- Analyze the current scenario in terms of causes of variations and defects
- Improve the process by systematically reducing variation and eliminating defects
- Control future performance of the process Scenario
(b) focuses on process design using Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) approach. DFSS typically requires IDOV:
- Identify process goals in terms of critical parameters, industry & competitor benchmarks, VOC Design involves enumeration of potential solutions and selection of the best
- Optimize performance by using advanced statistical modeling and simulation techniques and design refinements
- Validate that design works in accordance to the process goals
Online Resource to Master SixSigma
SixSigma KnowledgeCenter - Offering immediate access to a wealth of comprehensive reference materials, topical spotlights, and ongoing automatic content updates, the SixSigma KnowledgeCenter facilitates both on-the-job learning and more formal instruction. SixSigma KnowledgeCenter is a one-stop skills improvement center for Project Managers at all levels.
From the SixSigma KnowledgeCenter, you can access the following learning resources:
- Books24x7
- Featured Topic
- Practice Labs and Certification MaintenanceExternal Resources
This post is very informative and read full...
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing info..
Six Sigma Certification is another certification that, bit by bit, rises to fame.
ReplyDeleteThis course is very important since business is what runs within an organization. Thanks a lot for sharing!