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What is Six Sigma?
Home » Quality Control » Six Sigma » What is Six Sigma?Six Sigma is a quality improvement program used for identifying and eliminating defects, waste and quality-control problems in manufacturing. The goal is to achieve six sigma levels of quality. A sigma is a statistical term for the standard deviation of a set of data, so six sigma refers to six standard deviations.
The management philosophy was created at Motorola in the mid-1980s and has since spread to many other manufacturing companies including GE and Microsoft. In recent years it has also branched into the service and healthcare industries.
The basic premise behind Six Sigma is that if a company can measure the amount of defects in a process, the company can systematically determine how to eliminate them, getting as close to zero defects, or perfection, as possible.
Authors Pete Pande and Larry Holpp say in their book What is Six Sigma?(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002): Six Sigma is a total management commitment and philosophy of excellence, customer focus, process improvement, and the rule of measurement rather than gut feel. Six Sigma is about making every area of the organization better able to meet the changing needs of customers, markets, and technologies – with benefits for employees, customers, and shareholders.
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