Six sigma - An effective technique for companies to gain competitive advantage

Six Sigma is a systematized tactics for strategic process upgrading and new product and service development that depends on statistical methods and the scientific technique to make vivid reductions in customer defined fault rates. The notion of Six Sigma was evolved in 1986 by Motorola as a set of tools and techniques to enhance the processes. The term six sigma is based on a statistically measure that equates to 3.4 or fewer errors per million opportunities.

Goals of Six Sigma:

The key role of Six Sigma is to augment the performance of manufacturing industry. It was initially established as quality control especially for huge manufacturing companies. The major objective of six sigma was to improve the manufacturing processes along with removing the number of flaws found in them. Afterward, the approach of Six Sigma was extended to various other types of industries regardless of their size around the globe. Six Sigma methodology guarantees that the manufacturing process has minimum imperfections. Six sigma has a set of metrics that can be used to realize project goals and monitor progress. Six sigma is a measurement device to evaluate the level of quality and is based on the Normal distribution.

Six Sigma detects and eradicates the imperfection which results in reducing errors in process of the business and manufacturing to improve the quality of productions. In this procedure, a set of quality management techniques is used to create within the organization for a special infrastructure of the people who can use these methods like experts. An organization follows distinct steps to quantify the targeted value of the project while using each project of Six Sigma. Such as, companies lessen the impact of pollution, reduce time cycle of a process and decrease cost of production to generate profits and satisfy its clienteles.

Functioning of Six Sigma:

 A sigma rating can designate the maturity of a manufacturing process by representing its percentage of imperfection free products created or its yield. Almost 100% products manufactured through Six Sigma process are statistically expected to be errorless even of the level of their defect is equal to 4.5. An objective of Six Sigma was set by Motorola for all of its manufacturing processes and all of its engineering and management practices to take this goal by-word for its accomplishment.

Numerous researchers propose three possible approaches to implement Six Sigma in companies. The first is through a business transformation approach where an organisation undertakes complete change to transform its outmoded method of working in order to recuperate customers or to revive from major losses. The second is the strategic improvement approach limited to one or two critical business needs focusing on major opportunities and flaws. The third is a problem-solving approach which concentrate on tenacious issues.

Traits of Six Sigma:

The key features of Six Sigma to enhance manufacturing industry are as under:

This methodology has main focus on measuring the financial returns of any project, the ardent commitment and support of the managers of an organization about their leadership, and creation of infrastructure of professionals. These features allow the responsibilities and role of every personnel within the team to augment the manufacturing process of the organization.

Majority of the companies have adopted this quality control system for improving their products and services. It is represented that in adopting Six Sigma, they generated huge profit. The triumphant example of six sigma is Volvo car corp. which completed 500 six sigma projects and created net profit of one million SEK. 

Lean Six Sigma:

Lean concept is closely associated with Six Sigma in industry. Lean Six Sigma is an amalgamation of Lean methods and Six Sigma techniques. Lean manufacturing, commonly called as "Lean", is a production practice. Lean Six Sigma enhanced the knowledge, methods and tools stemmed from many decades of operational improvement research and implementation. Lean approaches concentrate on decreasing cost through process optimization. The main dogma of Lean Six Sigma is "the activities that cause the customer's critical-to-quality issues and create the longest time delays in any process offer the greatest opportunity for enhancement in cost, quality, capital, and lead time". This philosophy accentuates the strength of concentrating on customer requirements and shortening lead times. Though Lean and Six Sigma focus on dissimilar improvement goals, the decrease of waste and process variation, an analysis of each method displays that the approaches counterpart each other.

Six sigma has numerous benefits in production companies such as this approach generates sustained success, sets a performance goals for everyone, enhances values for customers, accelerates the rate of improvements, promotes learning and cross pollination and executes strategic change. It has been observed that Six Sigma methods has improved the efficiency of production capability, minimising waste such as reduced need for inspection, removed unusable components and unnecessary movements and decreased time for renovation.

To realise key details, six Sigma is an effective process of quality control in any manufacturing organizations. This technique adopts data, measurements and statistics to recognize process inadequacies and then applies strategic tools to remove imperfections through decreasing process dissimilarity. Companies which espouse the six sigma approaches have reduced waste, generate revenues and improve shareholder value. It can be appraised that six sigma is intricate but flexible technique to maintain and realize business success.