What is Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process – from development or manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.
Six Sigma is a method that provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation helps lead to defect reduction and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services.
How to achieve Six Sigma?
To achieve Six Sigma — statistically — a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications. A Six Sigma opportunity is then the total quantity of chances for a defect.
Continuous Improvement as a way of living
Continuous improvement, also called continual improvement, based on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle is the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes. Continuous improvement can be implemented by using incremental or breakthrough improvements. These can be applied interchangeably, but the best way to deploy a thorough continuous improvement program is to combine both. By doing this you can deal with quick wins while giving complex and larger projects the time and attention required.
There are a wide variety of continuous improvement methods and methodologies that can be used to achieve the best results such as Six Sigma, Lean, Innovation, Total Quality Management. All that is required is to select or combine those and their tools and the rest is magic.
The benefits of continuous improvement as way of living is to make your company constantly better by improving your practices to make your team and business more efficient, accurate, and effective.
There will always be room to improve your processes and methods!
Six Sigma and Data Driven Decision-Making
Data-driven decision making (DDDM) is an approach to business governance that values decisions that can be backed up with verifiable data rather than making decisions that are intuitive or based on observation alone, supporting competitive advantage.
The success of the data-driven approach is reliant upon the quality of the data gathered and the effectiveness of its analysis and interpretation.
Business intelligence tools are a strong resource to analyze the data and allow easy dashboards customization to display the important information in real time. The changes in how data can be mined and visualized allows business executives who have no technology backgrounds to be able to work with analytics tools and make data-driven decisions.
