Six Sigma Tutorials, Six Sigma Certification - Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt help.

 

Six Sigma is a quality discipline that focuses on product and service excellence to create a culture that demands perfection on target, every time. It is a mathematical term (Sigma is a Greek word) that represents a measure of standard deviation or variability within a given population around the mean. It represents population that falls within plus or minus six standard deviations. Six Sigma methodologies, provides the techniques and tools to improve the capability and reduce the defects in any process.

It was started in Motorola, in its manufacturing division, where millions of parts are made using the same process repeatedly. Eventually Six Sigma evolved and applied to other non manufacturing processes. Today you can apply Six Sigma to many fields such as Services, Medical and Insurance Procedures, Call Centers.

Motorola company’s engineers in 1980, decided to measure the defects per million opportunities, instead of traditional quality levels – measuring defects in thousands of opportunities. They developed this new standards and created methodology and necessary cultural changes associated with it.

Six Sigma focuses first on reducing variation and then on improving process capabilities.

A common goal of Six Sigma programme is to minimize variation within all of our critical processes. Quantitatively it means fewer than 3.4 defects per million ‘opportunities’. An opportunity is defined as a “chance for non-conformance”. Statistically, Six Sigma ensures that 99.9997% of all products produced in a process are of acceptable quality

It aims for the businesses to adjust its culture towards accepting a near perfect operation in executing key processes. Such a cultural change will directly contribute towards customer satisfaction and increased productivity. Motorola on successful implementation of Six Sigma programme documented more than US$16 Billion in savings.

Six Sigma can also be defined as a process focused methodology, designed to improve business performance through improving specific areas of a strategic business process.

Six Sigma methodologies improve any existing business process by constantly reviewing and re-tuning the process.  To achieve this, Six Sigma uses a methodology known as DMAIC (Define opportunities, Measure performance, Analyze opportunity, Improve performance, Control performance).

Six Sigma is in short a powerful tool that can help an organization to design, operate, and control every process in such a manner that no process yields more than 3.4 defects for every million opportunity. Concept of Six Sigma is applicable to the service and manufacturing industries, to all functions – production, marketing, personnel, etc. and all the processes such as manufacturing, pay roll or dispatch operations.

Six Sigma experts (Green Belts and Black Belts) evaluate a business process and determine ways to improve upon the existing process. The process of improvements are over seen by Six Sigma Master Black Belts.

If a given process fails to meet the criteria, it is re-analyzed, altered and tested to find out if there are any improvements. If no improvement is found, the process is re-analyzed, altered and tested again. This cycle is repeated until you see an improvement. Once an improvement is found, it’s documented and the knowledge is spread across other units in the company so they can implement this new process and reduce their defects per million opportunities.

Six Sigma experts can also design a brand new business process using DFSS (Design For Six Sigma) principles. Typically its easier to define a new process with DFSS principles than refining an existing process to reduce the defects. The Six Sigma improvement process used to develop new products or processes is DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify)

Six Sigma incorporates (1) The basic principles and techniques used in Business,

(2) Statistics, and Engineering. These three form the core elements of Six Sigma.

Six Sigma (1) Improves the process performance, (2) Decreases variation and (3) Maintains consistent quality of the process output. This leads to defect reduction and improvement in profits, product quality and customer satisfaction.

Six Sigma methodology is also used in many Business Process Management initiatives these days. These Business Process Management initiatives are not necessarily related to manufacturing. Many of the BPM’s that use Six Sigma in today’s world include call centers, customer support, supply chain management and project management.

METHODOLOGY: Let us first understand some of the terms associated with the implementation of Six Sigma.:

SPONSOR – is business executive leading the organization.

CHAMPIONS – Business leaders who lead Six Sigma by sponsoring projects. Champions are trained to select the projects keeping in view business goals. They are responsible for Six Sigma strategy deployment and vision.

BELTS – They are project leaders selected and mentored by the Champions.

PROCESS OWNER – they are owner of the process product or service being improved.

MASTER BLACK BELTS – they are coach Black Belts having expertise in statistical tools.

BLACK BELTS – they are experts working on 3 to 5 projects per year, project being worth $2,50,000.

GREEN BELTS – works with black belts on projects.

Six Sigma methodology has evolved out of decades of research and is a proven strategy for improving all aspects of an organization’s structure. As mentioned before core of Six Sigma methodology is DMAIC. The leaders chosen by the company called Six Sigma Black Belts and Green Belts have to go through rigorous training to seek out defects and eliminate them.

DEFINE: Define all the parameters to be included in the Six Sigma process. They can be team which will work on improvements, customers of the process, their needs and requirements, define problem in concrete measurable terms with an operational definition. Define customers and requirements critical to quality. Develop problem statements.

MEASURE: Once the project has a clear definition with a clear measurable function the process is studied to determine the key process steps and key process inputs for each process. After the key input list is ready the Belt will consider the potential impact each input has with respect to the project variations. Inputs are prioritized to establish a short list to study in more detail. With this list Belts will determine the potential ways the process can take place. How the input can go wrong? Once the reason for input failure is determined, preventive action plans are worked out.

ANALYZE: Through analysis the team can determine the cause of the problem that need improvement.

IMPROVE: This step consists of generating, selecting and implementing of solutions. Pilot studies may be carried out and potential improvements validated, corrected and re-evaluated till Six Sigma goal of 3.4 defects per million opportunities is achieved.

CONTROL: Define and validate monitoring system to control that improvements achieved with the above process are sustained for long time.

Once benefits are realized, cost savings generated and profit growth due to changes are ensured, proper documentations for the improved system should be finalised and properly documented before closing the Six Sigma project. The project report should be circulated, due credits to the concerned persons to be given and success celebrated.