What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a revolution in the way businesses operate. It was first created in the 1980s by Motorola and then adopted by Jack Welch at GE although its roots come from W. Edwards Deming's work in the 1970s on production quality in Japan.

Overall Six Sigma can be broadly defined as three things:

1. A system of management to achieve lasting business leadership and world-class performance

2. A goal of reaching near-perfect performance

3. A statistical measure of the performance of a process or product.

In addition because Six Sigma is a widely used and enormously successful methodology for business process improvement it provides a wealth of tried-and-tested tools and techniques that can be leveraged by managers to assist them in improving operations.

The name "Six Sigma" comes from a statistical measurement of variation known as the standard deviation (Ã). This is used as a measure of how well a process or procedure is operating or, in other words, how many "faults", "defects" or "errors" it has, and is based on a "bell shaped" normal distribution curve.

If a process is operating at "1Ã" it has around 31% accuracy which means 69% of the product or service suffers from faults or errors. For a process operating at "4Ã" this has improved to 99.38% accuracy. At first glance 99.38% may sound pretty good, however this still means 6,210 faults per million opportunities (i.e. sales, customers served).

OK you say, fine. But what does this have to do with me?

The aim of Six Sigma improvement is to achieve wherever possible a 99.9997% accuracy. This still accepts that no product or process will ever be completely perfect, but it sets a limit on how many errors are acceptable to your business and ultimately to your customers.

If you think this is unrealistic or fanciful then be careful, because your competitors all over the world are implementing Six Sigma programmes across their organisations with EXACTLY this goal in mind.

Furthermore, Six Sigma initiatives have achieved high profile and massive improvements in customer service and in profitability. Even if you haven't heard about it yet, it is likely that if you work in a large organisation there is already a Six Sigma programme somewhere that will eventually cross your path.

The real difference between Six Sigma and other quality initiatives such as "TQM" is the degree to which management plays a key role in monitoring and owning program results and accomplishments. Many organisations are tying part of their executive remuneration directly into the successful delivery of Six Sigma initiatives.