Six Sigma : Profit Enhancement Tool for Various Organizations

Six Sigma wasninitiated by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986 and is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola, Inc. General Electric Company is one of the early adopters and popularized Six Sigma. Since then a variety of organizations have adopted the discipline and highly benefited from it. Six Sigma stands for Six Standard Deviations (Sigma is the Greek letter used to represent standard deviation in statistics) from mean. It provides the techniques and tools to improve the capability and reduce the defects in any process by constantly reviewing and re-tuning. It allows for only 3.4 defects per million opportunities for each product or service. To achieve this, Six Sigma uses two methodologies known as DMAIC (Define the project goals and customer (internal and external) deliverables, Measure the process to determine current performance, Analyze and determine the root cause(s) of the defects Improve the process by eliminating defects, Control future process performance and DMADV (Define the project goals and customer (internal and external) deliverables, Measure and determine customer needs and specifications, Analyze the process options to meet the customer needs, Design (detailed) the process to meet the customer needs).