What is Six Sigma?Six Sigma is a quality management program to attain "six sigma" levels of quality.Six Sigma is a extremely disciplined process that assists to focus on producing and redeeming near-perfect products and services. The word "Sigma" is a statistical term that measures how far a given process varies from flawlessness. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can quantify how many "defects" you have in a run, you can systematically figure out how to do away with them and get as close to "zero defects" as conceivable.
To accomplish Six Sigma quality, a process must create no more than 3.4 defects (defect=failing to deliver what the customer wants) per million opportunities. An "opportunity" is defined as a chance for nonconformance, or not meeting the required specifications. Six Sigma centers first on reducing process variation and then on improving the process capability (process capability=what your process can deliver).
Six Sigma was pioneered at Motorola in the mid-1980s by Bob Galvin, who followed his father and Motorola founder, Paul Galvin, as head of the company, and by Motorola engineer Bill Smith. It has since spread to numerous other manufacturing companies, including Ford, GE, Caterpillar, Honeywell, Raytheon, Seagate Technology, and Microsoft. However, it can be employed wherever the control of variation is desired. In recent years, it has begun to offshoot out into the service industry, and in 2000, Fort Wayne, Indiana became the first metropolis to apply the program in a city government. Some, claiming that Six Sigma's impact has not yet been fully realized, advocate an open source approach so that the principles of Six Sigma might be more widely adopted.
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