The business world views Six Sigma as the gold-standard in quality measurement. It is a useful tool in industries ranging from manufacturing to software development. But what is Six Sigma, and how do you calculate it? It’s primarily known for being a highly effective quality tool and improvement methodology. Six Sigma deals primarily with elimination variation to improve production processes and product quality. Variation, like waste (Muda), can strike where you least expect it, accumulating over time to cause further problems.
Six Sigma aims for a state in which variation appears only 3.4 times per every million opportunities. Instead of being satisfied with 95% success, 99.99966% is the ideal goal. This is what we might refer to as the Six Sigma state. Like Kaizen (continuous improvement), Six Sigma is a state of being that one must achieve. While Six Sigma math and Six Sigma programs come from industrial process design, you can apply both concepts to any industry. But how do you calculate your Six Sigma level? Read on to find out.
How to Calculate Your Six Sigma Level
Firstly, you must decide what constitutes opportunity versus what constitutes defect. You should standardize your measuring systems if this is to work. As an example, you may have a hospital that considers a single administration of a drug an opportunity. Similarly, if you deliver the wrong medication or the wrong dose, they may consider this a defect. Opportunities and defects like these are black and white, yes or no, good or bad. Success or failure. Once you establish this understanding, you can then make precise quantifications for your opportunities and defects.
Next, you should calculate your yield by subtracting the number of defects from the total opportunities and dividing by the number of opportunities. This will give you a decimal figure which you should express as a percentage. As another example, a hospital that administered 145,250 correct doses last month may have messed up around 250 of them. Your yield here would be 145,500 minus 250, divided by 145,500. Don’t round up the figure, as precision is important here. In this example, the hospital would get 99.828 percent. Now, you should judge your yield against the standard baseline (99.99966%) for Six Sigma success. If your figure equals or succeeds this threshold, you have achieved Six Sigma.
Useful Information
Six Sigma may sound glamorous, but it’s just a useful way to indicate standard deviations. When a process operates at optimum, i.e. Six Sigma, levels, it yields results which equal the Six Sigma benchmark. These results also tend to fall outside the six standard deviations of the mean for a data set. While it is possible to calculate and check the yield of any process against the 99.99966% threshold, you may also wish to model your performance in other ways. For example, you could calculate the standard deviation of your data to identify your current sigma level. Six Sigma is incredibly wide-reaching, appearing in just about every sector, especially manufacturing industries. However, Six Sigma ideas don’t necessarily translate as well to service-based industries, which lack the same large-scale processes.
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