Defining six sigma. What is a process? A process is a repetitive and systematic series of steps or activities where inputs are modified in order to achieve a value added output or results. processes are designed to add value to the customer and should not include unnecessary activities. The outcome of a well designed process is increased effectiveness that's value for the customer and increased efficiency, less cost for the company. A process should listen to the voice of the customer or to customer feedback.

Six Sigma is about reducing variation in Process Performance to an optimum level that is acceptable by the customer. It must defecting million opportunities and a six sigma level means that the process operates at 99.99966%. According to the American Society for Quality Six Sigma is a fact based and data driven philosophy of quality improvement that values defect prevention over defect detection, and offers a structured framework for achieving sustainable process improvement. It is essentially a customer focused philosophy of database problem solving. It drives customer satisfaction and bottom line results by reducing variation in waste, and in this way, promoting a competitive advantage. It is a disciplined process that enables delivery of new perfect products and services.

Overall, it's successful business strategy to drive bottom line improvement. The symbol of Six Sigma is a Greek letter for measuring process variation, the Sigma symbol is used to represent the distribution or spread about the mean of any process or procedure. Now, what is the purpose of Six Sigma? The basic foundation of Six Sigma is the defects per million opportunities metric are also called DPM or metric. diploma is a scientific measure and a way to look at the number of mistakes or defective results you'd get from product or service. This metric sits inside your organizational system within which Six Sigma operates.

The next part of the Six Sigma organizational system is the improvement methodology within which the DPM or metric resides. This methodology is known as the make methodology, which stands for define, measure, analyze, improve and control We'll look into the D make roadmap later on. Six Sigma has a proven track record. companies of all kinds have been using Six Sigma basic techniques for nearly 100 years. The term Six Sigma was popularized by General Electric and Motorola back in the 80s, and 90s. Six Sigma has been widely adopted by industry leaders four kinds.

It has been a very good toolkit and method to accomplish a number of things. It's important to remember that the use of Six Sigma is not limited to manufacturing organizations only. Even though this where the development of 16 more began. It has been successfully deployed in every kind of business profit, nonprofit government manufacturing. Why should we use Six Sigma, the expected outcome of applying Six Sigma in any type of organization The reduction in operating costs and increased customer satisfaction. Bringing costs under control is always critical.

Six Sigma is well suited for this purpose, as it provides methods to reduce the cost of quality over time. In terms of customer satisfaction levels, any Six Sigma processes that are being performed properly, are very focused on the voice of the customer. This enables you to focus on where and why you're going to be making changes. Some reasons for making changes include reducing variation, reducing inefficiencies, and improving the overall quality of your processes. An additional benefit to using Six Sigma is that when it's properly applied, you can actually improve the net profits and the company value being derived from these operations over time to help ensure long term success viability with strong customer focus, you can leverage techniques like six sigma. Let's now look at how we measure six sigma.

There are two main things to remember here. First is standard deviation, or sigma, which is a measure that is used to quantify the amount of dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be close to the mean set of values, also called expected value, while a high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a wider range of values, which means that many data points will be far away from the mean. The second thing to remember is how we measure six sigma. We measure it in terms of defects per million opportunities. We say that For a process to operate at Six Sigma level, it needs to have 3.4 defects per 1 million opportunities.

If you're able to measure and capture data about something, you can begin to chart it and look at its relative performance against a mean measurement. As already, we mentioned with six sigma methods, you can use standard deviations to understand how the performance of a process compares to an upper or lower specification limit for what you're trying to make, produce or deliver to your customers. The standard deviations can be presented on a bell shaped curve with lower specification limit of minus six sigma and an upper specification limit of plus six sigma. the mean value is zero. So each step left Right is plus or minus one standard deviation at the point of six standard deviations to the left or right. If your process is operating at a level of Six Sigma quality, you'd expect it to be 99.9997% defect free.

This would indicate only about three defects per million opportunities. It is important that you understand the distribution of the data and the importance of the upper and lower specification levels. Because as the Sigma value decreases, the DPM o value will increase significantly. The standard deviation can be presented on a bell shaped curve with a lower specification limit of minus six sigma and an upper specification limit of plus six sigma the mean value is zero. So each step left or right is plus or minus one standard deviation. At the point of six standard deviations to the left or right.

If your process is operating at a level of Six Sigma quality, you'd expect it to be at 99.997% defect free. This would indicate only about three defects per million opportunities. It is important that you understand the distribution of the data and the importance of the upper and lower specification levels. Because as the signal value decreases, the D PMO value will increase significantly. The rule of 6895 99.7 is the shorthand used to remember the percentage of values that lie within a band around the mean In a normal distribution with a width of two, four and six standard deviations. Now let's see what is sigma level determining sigma levels of processes.

One sigma Six Sigma etc, allows Process Performance to be compared throughout an entire organization. Because it is independent of the process. It is simply an estimation of opportunities and defects. Sigma is a statistical term that measures how much a process varies from perfection based on the number of defects per million units. For a normally distributed output 99.7% would be expected to fall between plus and minus three sigma levels. Through our knowledge of the customer, we have set a target or specification limits we call For the individual outputs of our processes, we see from this picture that some fraction of our processes output does not meet our customers expectations.

That is, these are inside the specification limits as set by the customer, lower specification limit and upper specification limit. Sometimes, our customers have requirements that set both an upper and lower specification on our process. The objective of Six Sigma is to reduce process variation and effect. All processes have variation. There are two things that can occur as a result of this variation. First, the processes of center.

This means that the output from the process is missing the target. And second, the process hits too much threat This means that there is a wide variance in the output from the process. The objective is to reduce the spread and hit the target performance by removing those factors that are causing variation in the process. variation in the process can result in defects in the output.