Six Sigma Goals

Average American company is at level four of six sigma. This is equivalent to 0.6% defective or 6.210 defects per million.

Six sigma can be defined as “Business improvement approach that seeks to find and eliminate causes of mistakes or defects in business processes by focusing on outputs that are of critical importance to customers”

In Six Sigma, failure rate is defined as defects per opportunity (DPO) or Defects per million opportunities (DPM).

Defect Levels:

• 6 Sigma 3.4 ppm
• 5 Sigma 233 ppm
• 4 Sigma 6,210 ppm

Six Sigma strategy should consist of the following eight elements:

• R Recognize true state of business
• D Define what plans are in place to realize improvement of each state
• M Measure the business systems that support the plans
• A Analyse the gaps in system performance benchmarks
• I Improve system
• C Control system-level chars
• S Standardize the systems
• I Integrate systems

Business successes from Six Sigma:

1. Cost reductions
2. Market-share growth
3. Defect reductions
4. Culture changes
5. Productivity improvements
6. Customer relations imporvements
7. Product & service improvements
8. Cycle-time reductions

Motorola credits Six-Sigma to savings of $940 M over 3 years. It discovered a 10 to 1 payback for Six Sigma training investments.

Levels of training required:

1. Sr Mgmt : Sponsorship Training
2. Master Black Belt: Black Belt training
3. Management : Executive Training
4. Supervisors: Overview
5. Everyone: Six Sigma Orientation
6. Green Belts: Green Belt Training.