Every industry has their special words or expressions that are exclusive to them. Mere mortals usually don’t understand what the industry specific jargon means. Well, Six Sigma wants all industries to be part of the Six Sigma family, so we are reviewing some of the special words, expressions and acronyms to make sure everyone is included.
Process: This is the day-to-day activity that must occur to produce a product or service.
Process Map/Flow Chart: This a chart that visually shows the series of steps, describes the steps and who does them to produce a product or service. This will show the flow of the process(s) or events that has to happen to produce a product or service.
SIPOC: Stands for Suppliers-Inputs-Process-Outputs-Customers. This is used to define a process from beginning to end.
PDCA: Plan-Do-Check-Act. This is an improvement methodology that is quite easy to use and very effective.
Output: This is what is produced by a process step, the result.
Affinity Diagram: This is a tool to organize ideas and data into priorities and categories.
Benchmarking: This is used to set a standard by comparing a set of business processes and performances to the industry’s best practices and seeing if there is a gap that can be fixed.
Defect: Anything that isn’t done right the first time.
Defect Opportunity: Any task or activity that can be measured that does not fulfill the requirement for value.
Poka-yoke: Mistake proofing. This is an action you take in Six Sigma to significantly lower the opportunity for error so much so that the customer never experiences the error.
Input: This is a resource added by a supplier to the process; this can be a product, service, data, even labor.
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