What is Six Sigma? This question has been posed to me several times from different people. Everytime, I try to answer the question, depending on the person's professional background & awareness with business processes. There are myriad books and articles on this topic, written by stalwarts and experts of Six Sigma. Before, I define it myself, here are a few definitions from other sources:
"Six Sigma is a business management strategy, originally developed by Motorola, that today enjoys wide-spread application in many sectors of industry.
Six Sigma seeks to identify and remove the causes of defects and errors in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization ("Black Belts" etc.) who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction or profit increase)."
"Six Sigma at many organizations simply means a measure of quality that strives for near perfection. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process -- from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service."
As a practising Six Sigma Black Belt, here is how I define this concept to someone, who is remotely related to engineering, manufacturing, or statistics:
Six Sigma is a structured customer-focussed, data-driven, problem-solving approach to improve business processes and making a direct postive impact on business profits.
The terms used are defined as follows:
Structured: Believe and follow the steps as described in the roadmaps.
Customer-focussed: What will my customer like in my product or service?
Data-driven: Do not jump on solutions. Let the data drive the conclusions.
Problem-solving: A well-defined problem affectine our business, either directly or indirectly.
Business processes: Functional processes inside a businesses. Can be drilled down deeper.
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