Six Sigma

Six Sigma Program

What is the Objective?

Well, it is simple. Reason most processes fail in giving results to the business is because the process' outputs almost entirely depending on the inputs provided which in turn also impacts customer satisfaction. An effective way of reducing the variations to enhance customer satisfaction levels is to implement a Six Sigma Program on the mission-critical processes. Six Sigma works on the principle of 3.4 defects per Million Opportunities which means that the customer will see defects on his product on 3.4 times of all the times that he has ever received the product.

Conceptually, what are the elements of a Six Sigma Program?

Processes fail because they do not anticipate deviations or variations in their results. Six Sigma takes into count all special variations which have the potential to displace the results in some way.

• The ability of a process to deliver the results on a short-term basis is known as Short Term Capability. This is generally defined by the process to deliver results on a near-perfect mechanism and does not take the variations into count.
  
  
• The ability of a process to deliver the results on a long-term basis is known as Long Term Capability. This is measured by the process' ability to deliver long term customer expectations at 3.4 DPMO. It also takes variations into count.

The difference between both of them results in what is defined as a shift. In Six Sigma terminologies, for short term capabilities, the result should be 3.4 DPMO and that for long term capabilities should be 4.5 DPMO. With a shift of 1.5, a process balances the results from the short term as well as the long term point of view. The process value of the sigma levels may increase from 0 to 6, but around the mean value, the variation of the process dies down. The end objective is to decrease process variation as the process variance is the square of the process standard deviation.

Integrating Six Sigma Programs into mission critical processes have ensured businesses a great amount of success. One of the main reasons for this is though a six sigma program is designed and implemented by the team members of a business, the results are directed towards enhanced customer satisfaction.

With the ability of business managers to measure process variations from a long term perspective, business owners are in a point where variations and reasons for variations could even be forecasted and accounted for. Armed with the knowledge of Six Sigma, a lot of Six Sigma trained professionals aim to make a critical difference in productivity improvement and cost reduction for the business by integrating Six Sigma programs to their processes.