In today's business world which has such a harsh competition, taking a strong part by producing or serving to the customers has significantly become harder. Of course, it is a kind of "survival-of-the-fittest" game for most of the companies, and "big fish eats the little fish" is still a strong statement even though the innovation has made some little companies faster and stronger than other bigger ones. However, we are well aware of the fact that most of today's leaders do not have any doubt about that if you can not improve customer satisfaction with the improvement of your products and supply chain management, being a big fish and taking a strong part in a difficult business environment is such a dream. Therefore, Six Sigma has been developed to fill up this gap with creativity and innovation.What is Six Sigma? I think firstly we should ask this question to ourselves. Six Sigma is a process of identifying and defining the variation in our production process and of finding correct techniques to minimize them. It was first established by Motorola in 1986, and in a short period of time, it was started to be used by many other big and middle size companies. For example, General Electric (GE) is one of the most popular and the biggest followers of this process under the authority of the company's legendary CEO Jack Welch. Also, as he has stated, "in such a big supply chain which GE has, embracing Six Sigma brings the help and the support to suppliers and the most importantly customers."
What are the rules and six steps for Six Sigma? What kind of advantages does it bring to our organization? First of all, we should clarify that Six Sigma is a way of checking quality by identifying and counting the defects (errors) in a production process. If a company is aiming for minimized deviation and applying Six Sigma into its process, the company managers from bottom to top have to understand the importance of making each employee in the organization understand what Six Sigma means, and how and why they are applying this method into their production process. Also, all employees including especially top managers must believe in the process and take it in a serious way. Secondly, we always aim customer satisfaction by applying Six Sigma which means that Customers are our target. Customers have to get the non-defected productions. By the same token, Six Sigma helps us minimize the deviation. Once Jack Welch has said that "deviation is an evil for the company". What he means is that deviation (errors, defects) has to be got rid of or at least minimized to satisfy the customers even though we know that whatever happens in a production process, defects are always going to happen. Hence, how much we are minimizing the defects is the important question. "Keep the process on target by reducing variation to satisfy the customers." is the popular saying of Six Sigma.
Now I would like to explain with really easy terms how Six Sigma process reduces the deviation. As all of us know, the normal distribution which is also called Bell Curve is given above. The lines are representing our variations, and the more we have errors, the steeper our curve is. Therefore, when we apply Six Sigma method on our product process by aiming an important target which is customer satisfaction, we see that the line gets more smoother and wider as red line represents. That means we are decreasing the errors by using 6 different sigma processes.
There is one more thing that we should take into consideration. In terms of using Six Sigma, always lean to the customer satisfaction, do not forget that people are the most valuable resource, and always keep continues improvement which means Six Sigma is a process which needs applying in the long run to get the correct results. Therefore, the companies have to solve the problems one by one and eliminate waste and variation in every process by aiming the perfection and by using team work.
I will try to write more about Six Sigma which is a subject that I am interested in, so it will be continued.
I am posting some of the webpages and articles that I have used to write this entry.
For Six Sigma Motorola articles
The Six Sigma Sweep
Wikipedia Source - Six Sigma
GE Six Sigma source
Six Sigma web page
