A Beginner's Guide to Six Sigma

So everywhere you turn nowadays you seem to hear about six sigma. Obviously its some type of quality control program that many big businesses are jumping on the bandwagon for right now. What we don't all know, however, is what it actually means. Now sigma is obviously a statistical term, and six sigma does have a statistical goal in mind but for the sake of this article I will try to stay away from that and give you a description in perfectly understandable terms.

Six Sigma is basically a system which aims at minimizing the defects resulting from the process a business uses to create its product. This is exceptionally important in things that are produced where failure is never an option (i.e. jet engines, backup parachutes, and things of that nature). When quality is key it is important to make sure there is little to no variability in the product you produce to ensure its success.

The six sigma model has five important steps (I know why not six, but six sigma refers to the statistical analysis of the results, not the process that gets us there). First you must identify and define the characteristics of your process which are important to customer satisfaction., and any gaps which may exist. Next you must quantify the work the process does, and any affect that work has on the gaps. Third you need to analyze the data (we should probably leave the quantifying and analyzing to the professionals). Now we figure out how to improve the process to meet the objectives we've set. The objectives generally are developed to address the gaps which affect customer satisfaction. After we have improved the process the final step is to continuously monitor the process and control it to ensure low variability in our desired result.

So that's the long and short of it. Six sigma is a method of managing the quality of the products a company produces by understanding the customers needs, utilizing all available data, improving existing processes, and monitoring them after they've been improved. With all of the statistics taken out the concept itself is fairly simple, and now when you hear about six sigma or a six sigma black belt (that's just a degree you get for completing required six sigma training, not an actual belt like in karate) you'll have at least a general idea of what that means.