PROJECT MANAGEMENT SPECIALISTS   

Sigma	Defects Per Million	Successes	Defects
One Sigma	690,000	31.0%	69.0%
Two Sigma	308,537	69.1%	30.9%
Three Sigma	66,807	93.3%	6.7%
Four Sigma	6,210	99.4%	0.6%
Five Sigma	233	99.97%	0.03%
Six Sigma	3.4	99.99966%	0.00034%

	Define
	Measure
	Analyse
	Improve
	Control

Key managers and senior staff members need to be trained to an appropriate level; yellow belt, green belt, black belt or master black belt.

Why Implement Six Sigma?

The business case for adopting a Six Sigma approach can be significantly boosted by taking into account the present hidden cost of correcting errors. In a manufacturing environment this could include such items as the wages bill while staff stand idle due to a shortage of materials, the cost of sending people around the world to correct manufacturing faults in items that have been shipped overseas, the cost of returning incorrect items shipped to customers and the loss of revenue (and profits) when a customer transfers their business to a more reliable supplier. 

Complex processes tend by their nature to go across departmental boundaries, so one of the first challenges when aiming for Six Sigma is to ensure that everyone is committed to the idea and that no department sets internal targets which would prevent success. 

A real-life example of a short-sighted departmental target was in a computer company where the manufacturing department wanted to reduce the cost of administration. Their solution was to employ fewer order administrators and target them to make fewer changes to each customer order. The administration staff prevaricated in some very creative ways when customers wanted their orders to be changed and customers were lost because the  company was hard to do business with.

Criticism of Six Sigma.

Six Sigma does have its critics. Some say that it is a group of existing techniques which have simply been brought together under one headline. That is true. But surely it doesn't detract from what it can achieve. Indeed, it is helpful to have a "buzz term" such as Six Sigma which everyone in an organisation can be familiar with.

The other main objection is a technical one, to the effect that Six Sigma methods fail to take into account the fact that real life processes do not generate statistics which fit exactly onto a standard deviation curve. That is true. But Six Sigma methods do approximate to real life and are practical to implement.

Six Sigma in One Sentence.

Six Sigma is a philosophy of continuous improvement, it is a set of tools for Improving quality and it is a statistical measure of how well a process works. 

Return to Top of Page