Six Sigma: A Brief History
If you really want to understand the Six Sigma concept, then you should probably know a little bit about its history. Motorola was the first to implement to this business strategy with great success in the 1980s with the help of CEO Bob Galvin. They started by using statistics which were mixed with the knowledge of business tools as a way to measure the quality improvement process. The process was developed later on by Dr. Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder who improved this method, making it more suited for the needs of Motorola thus making it more widely received.
Six Sigma is a methodology wisely structured in order to improve the business processes, focusing on reducing process variances and defects with the help of statistics and problem solving tools. In theory, the number of accepted defects per million opportunities is around 3.4, meaning that 99.99966% of manufactured products are expected to be free of defects. Even though there has been a lot of controversy around the number of defects per million, the main idea is that Six Sigma tries to achieve a production state of almost defect-free.
The methodology has borrowed concepts from the Eastern martial arts, the practitioners of Six Sigma being ranked by "belts". For example, green belts are the lowest rank as they are responsible for the implementation in their department, while black belts focus on the execution of projects. Master black belts have more responsibilities as they are higher in rank than other belts. They are the decision makers, being also responsible for the general implementation of the process. The highest rank is champion. They are the ones who take the most important decision within the company and make sure all other belts are doing their job.
The Six Sigma business strategy can be divided into six components. First of all, you need a team of employees who can accomplish different projects and reach certain goals. The decisions are made based on facts, not on opinions or speculations. Six Sigma also implies that everyone understands the process and that the management is doing all that is possible to reach certain goals. The role of leaders is crucial when it comes to making decisions as they are the ones responsible for success or the failure of a project. The collaborations between team members is also crucial and it should be very smooth. Also, this strategy is always chasing perfection and that is why it is very important that team leaders know how to motivate their workers in order to obtain the best results.
It usually takes about 4 to 6 months for a company to improve using this business strategy, and that is what makes it so attractive. Over the years, Six Sigma has become more and more popular, due to the very good results it has offered and the publicity it has received. That is why nowadays there are many companies who use this strategy in order to obtain more profit by reducing defects and costs.
About the Author
Casey Trillbar is the editor of SixSigmaTrainingGuide.com, which is a website aimed at supplying articles, information and resources to people considering undergoing Six Sigma Training. http://www.sixsigmatrainingguide.com
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