“Six Sigma for Everyone” book was another excellent read for me this week. I particularly love books that also provide the history of the subject, and George Eckes did exactly that. I was actually surprised to know that Six Sigma was developed by a smart engineer in my old company Motorola Solutions. No wonder that company has been defeating many market ups and downs for more than 90 years. The innovative spirit and the management support for quality pay off in the long term.
First, some definitions: The six in Six Sigma refers to the fact that it would take a six-standard deviation event from the mean for an error to happen. This translates to 3.4 errors out of one million events. Sigma represents the distance from the average in a dataset, known as the standard deviation in Statistics. In simple terms, deviation tells how distributed data points in a dataset are. And Six Sigma means that the company has really low variation in their process quality and the data plots are closer to the average, which is the ultimate goal. A company could be 5, 4, 3, or lower Sigma away from the mean. The worse their performance is, the lower Sigma they get. However, the less the variation is, the more predictable the company’s performance becomes. Variation represents the continuous change of values in data points taken over time, such as the delivery times to customers. The predictability of throughput of a process in performance is crucial for management. It drastically helps with accurate plans. And, Six Sigma aims to reduce the variation and improve predictability by providing a mindset and strategies, and of course, a new vocabulary. It takes each process holistically and attacks the problems caused by handoff ceremonies among departments.
In theory, #SixSigma promises a great improvement for inefficiencies of the manufacturing and services industry. As to its practice, it won’t be easy to introduce Six Sigma for it challenges many tribal instincts of organizations by putting the customer in the center and defies the “Us versus Them” mentality among the functional departments of organizations. I highly recommend #managers to get familiar with Six Sigma even if they won’t practice it fully or at all at their companies. It still gives a strong perspective on some of the organizational issues towards the target of high customer satisfaction.