Imagine big businesses such as GE (General Electric) that actually puts the customer first and foremost and makes a profit. In fact, GE takes customer service to a new level by keeping their promise of on-time delivery, great competitive prices, and putting out a great product based on what the customer wants or requires.

Key Core Concepts of Six Sigma

• Critical to Quality: Focuses on the attributes that are most important to the customer. 
• Defect: Failing to deliver what the customer wants.
• Process Capability: What your process can deliver.
• Variation: What the customer sees and feels.

All of the core concepts are very important, but the ones we are highlighting are ones that could be misunderstood, such as Critical to Quality (CTQ) and Variation. Let’s face it, if your customer isn’t getting what is important to him or her in your product or service, why would your customer continue doing business at your establishment? Getting what is important in the product is what your customer sees as quality. 

Variation in the product is never good; consistency is extremely important. Business processes should yield consistent products that are reliable. When Coca-Cola changed their flavor to the New Coke, there was an uproar. The consistent flavor of Coca-Cola that we all love is the reason we buy their product.

In a nutshell, if have adopted Six Sigma as your company culture, then everything that you do within your business should embrace Six Sigma’s customer-focused, data-driven philosophy. Otherwise, you won’t yield the results at its fullest.

For more information on our Six Sigma training courses and services, please visit 6sigma.com. 

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Six Sigma

Six Sigma is the world’s most trusted process improvement methodology. But what does it entail? Six Sigma’s primary aim is to reduce variation, to create greater quality and efficiency in the workplace. Like any science, Six Sigma uses statistics to validate hypotheses, with practitioners using data to justify their decisions and predict future problems. Furthermore, your mastery of Six Sigma depends on belt color, as different belts require different levels of training. Yellow Belts, for instance, have a basic understanding of Six Sigma and can conduct simple data analysis. Master Black Belts, on the other hand, are just that – masters of Six Sigma knowledge and technique. They utilize tools like DMAIC, hypothesis testing, statistical process control, root cause analysis, and Pareto charts. With these key skills, practitioners make lasting process and quality improvements in industries like manufacturing.

Lean

Lean shares many similarities with both Six Sigma, each complementing the other, giving rise to a hybrid methodology: Lean Six Sigma. LSS combines the best qualities of both improvement approaches to create even greater efficiency. But Lean alone takes a different approach. In Lean terms, anything that does not add value is a threat to production. Utilizing in-depth analytical techniques to identify waste, Lean allows you to eliminate it at the source. Below are the eight types of waste (Muda) that occur in the workplace.

1. Transport. Movement of people, products or information to different locations.
2. Inventory. Unnecessary storage of parts, pieces or documentation.
3. Motion. Any extraneous human motion or action. E.g. bending down, turning around, reaching, lifting, or walking.
4. Waiting. Needless waiting for parts, instructions, information or equipment.
5. Overproduction. Producing more product than your current demand due to human error. g. producing fifty batches of mobile phones when the customer only wanted ten.
6. Over-processing. Maintaining overly strict procedures or excessively high-grade materials than you need.
7. Defect. Variation, defective products, reworking, repeating tasks, incorrect documentation.
8. Skills. Failure to utilize talented employees appropriately. Delegating tasks to those unqualified to perform them.

Kaizen

Kaizen is a Japanese word, also known as continuous improvement, though its literal meaning is “good change.” As such, any positive change to a business’s production processes, quality, efficiency or productivity is Kaizen. There is some overlap with both Lean and Six Sigma, but, the difference between them is that Kaizen is not a practice. Kaizen is a culture, an attitude towards work, that you must cultivate to see positive change. You can use Lean and Six Sigma to build a continuous improvement culture at work. Moreover, the key is in the word “continuous,” in that there is no end. Therefore, Kaizen is not a single practice but a way of thinking. The aim of which is to create a sustained and continuous effort to maximize your business’s productivity and efficiency.

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What Makes a Green Belt Project?

Many people ask us what goes into a great Green Belt project, and it’s important to know the answer. Before selecting your next Six Sigma project, Green Belts should know what makes their work unique. So how do we recognize a great Green Belt project? Well, first of all, ensure your project is feasible for at least three months. It’s no good starting a project only for it to fall apart soon after. By targeting the issues that are just right, i.e. not too complex, nor too minor, your project has the best chance of success. Your project needs to be able to sustain you for a do-able period. Otherwise, productivity will start to lag. Below are some of our top Green Belt project ideas.

Learn more about our Six Sigma Green Belt training

Process Improvement Projects

Green Belts often deal with data to predict customer demand and identify process issues. Process improvement or problem-solving projects allow Green Belts to flex their analytical skills. Imagine you have an inefficient production system that you want to improve, but can’t find the root cause. A Green Belt project could target this issue to identify the underlying problem. By analyzing the process to see how it works, Green Belts can quickly identify causes of concern, such as redundant process stages.

Quality Improvement Projects

Quality is everything in Six Sigma. By reducing variation, Green Belt projects can make dramatic changes to your business success. Six Sigma’s aim is to achieve only 3.4 defects per million, which equates to a higher than 99% quality. You could find yourself with a substandard batch of phones fresh off the manufacturing floor. One batch could soon turn into several without proper attention. Green Belt project teams use techniques like root cause analysis and affinity diagrams to trace one issue to the next. This allows them to determine the root cause of the issue so you can act on it. You can then either change suppliers or source better quality parts, which means greater overall product quality. Greater quality leads to positive customer satisfaction which also ensures continued loyalty and profit.

Innovation Projects

Leveraging data to predict customer demand forms one of many Green Belt responsibilities. You can direct your Green Belt projects toward changing existing products to suit customer needs or starting from scratch. Green Belts regularly incorporate Lean principles into their work, allowing them to monitor and manipulate supply chains. This allows you to predict future demand and satisfy customer needs before the customer even knows what those needs are. You could base your Green Belt project around the creation of innovative new products that will extend your market reach. Using Six Sigma and Lean techniques, Green Belts can help your company attract customers who were previously out of reach.

Read More on Six Sigma Green Belt:

Career Opportunities for Six Sigma Green Belts

The Six Sigma Green Belt Makes You Rich in Knowledge

The Most Complete Six Sigma Green Belt Virtual Training Ever Taught

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Make Order Fulfillment Times More Efficient

Don’t forget that DMAIC can help you define, measure, analyze, improve, and control problems in your order fulfillment process. Similarly, you can use DMADV to devise completely new processes that build on your Six Sigma improvements. Moreover, Six Sigma is an excellent tool with which to revise your order fulfillment system. Doing so allows you to assist project teams in detecting issues like variation or waste. You can then correct these inadequacies by reducing none-value-adding processes like excessive paperwork, plus time- and travel-based waste. Six Sigma aims to garner the best results by improving quality and efficiency. Furthermore, you can implement automated processes such as shipment planning and verification to improve your organization.

Reducing Error to Zero = Optimum Supply Chain

If you want to increase efficiency for your supply chain, you must first minimize error. Various stages in the supply chain can benefit from particular Six Sigma-compatible techniques. Poka-Yoke, for example, reinforces your processes against mistakes. It prevents human error by allowing no possible margin for error, forcing workers to complete the task per pre-established specifications. Similarly, the 5S strategy can also help you minimize errors by targeting waste and variation as they appear. 5S allows you to Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain your processes to create a streamlined, efficient environment for work.

Improving Order Fulfillment Processes

When a customer makes an order, they expect you to deliver on that order promptly. You should fill orders so that they arrive on time, with complete, accurate documentation, and absolutely no delivery-based damage. Six Sigma will help you optimize your order fulfillment by recognizing system problems like insufficient planning processes or poor execution.

Combine Lean with Six Sigma to Minimize Waste

Use Lean Six Sigma to drive gross market share and maximize your revenue. You can identify and eliminate none-value-adding activities like waste. Lean principles will increase functionality and efficiency of your supply chains to make them more responsive.

There are various types of waste Lean Six Sigma can treat. Firstly, over-processing, where you spend too long processing an item. This also leads to excess costs and wasted time. To solve this issue, you should increase your inventory only per customer demand. Speculative forecasting can lead to significant losses as your predictions don’t always pan out.

Moreover, unnecessary process stages add zero value to a product or service. If the customer wouldn’t pay for it, then get rid of it. Inadequate layout of your production facility will inevitably lead to losses down the line. By simplifying and streamlining your processes with Lean Six Sigma, your supply chain efficiency will reach optimum levels.

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The Start of Six Sigma

Back in the seventies, Motorola invested their time primarily in manufacturing Quasar television sets. This was long before the advent of mobile phones, modern computers, the internet, and many of the technologies associated with Motorola. A Japanese company took over control of Motorola’s Quasar factory at the time and began implementing unheard of changes. They set about revamping and restructuring the way factory operations, rebuilding it from the ground up.

Soon, while under new management, Motorola’s Quasar factory began to produce TV sets with one-twentieth the number of defects than before. Simply put, there was something Japanese management brought to the factory that Motorola didn’t. The factory even maintained the same workforce, machinery, and design work. It soon became clear that Motorola management was the problem.
It was in the next decade that Motorola knuckled down and started treating quality with the seriousness it deserves. Their then CEO, Bob Galvin, redirected Motorola towards on the quality achieving Six Sigma levels of quality. It was this decision that made Motorola a top quality and profit leader in the business world. Six Sigma was the secret to their success. And it’s just as popular and effective today as it was then!

How Does Motorola Use Six Sigma Today?

For Six Sigma, quality is about helping an organization increase profit. In Six Sigma, quality is a value contributed by a productive enterprise or activity. Motorola uses Six Sigma to maintain high efficiency by eliminating waste and defect as they discover them. This may be on a production line or even in administration.

Six Sigma aims to improve quality by minimizing variation and (overlapping with Lean) reducing waste. This helped Motorola improved its products and services, producing them faster and for less. In basic terms, Six Sigma’s goals are preventing defect, reducing cycle time, and minimizing costs. Six Sigma’s effectiveness comes from its ability to identify and eliminate waste costs, i.e. those that provide no value for customers.

Unlike Motorola, companies that eschew or dismiss Six Sigma ideas tend to have extremely costly operating processes. For those operating at low sigma, the cost of (poor) quality tends to be high, often spending 25%-40% of their revenues addressing issues. Companies operating at Six Sigma, however, typically expend less than 5% to fix problems. The dollar cost of this gap is often considerably large. This has cost companies like General Electric between $8 billion and $12 billion annually. Motorola, however, has enjoyed and still enjoys the benefits of Six Sigma. As one of its leading pioneers, they have perfected it over the years. Their success is not surprising.

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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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What Does Lean Focus On?

Lean focuses on reducing the eight types of waste (Muda).  Defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, waste from transportation, inventory waste, waste from motion, unnecessary processing. Additionally, Lean principles aim to reduce waste by identifying and eliminating it. Lean also improves production by maximizing flow and identifying non-value-adding steps you should remove. Anything that does not add value for the customer is a potential threat to production. As such, Lean uses a holistic approach that aims to build a culture of continuous improvement and in-depth analysis.

Lean Principles, Tools, and Techniques

• PDCA. Standing for Plan, Do, Check, Act, PDCA is a rapid cycle-based strategy used to drive process improvement.

• 5S is a 5-step method for creating and maintaining an intuitive and efficient workplace. The 5 Ss stand for Sort, Set In Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain.

• 8 Types of Waste. Lean aims to eliminate the eight waste types: defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, waste from transportation, inventory waste, waste from motion, and unnecessary

• Value Stream Maps. VSMs are a visual method for displaying the key process steps in production.

• Flow is the unhindered movement of a process.

• Pull describes how customer demand is used to dictate process flow, i.e. what the customer wants, or might want, determines what a company produces.

What does Six Sigma Focus On?

Six Sigma and Lean share many similarities. As such, they complement each other very well. However, Six Sigma focuses primarily on reducing variation, just one of the seven types of waste Lean tackles. Six Sigma is used to complete improvement projects, aimed at solving process issues. It is also highly data-oriented, involving validation of hypotheses using statistics. Six Sigma knowledge is classified using a belt-based hierarchy styled on martial arts (Yellow, Green, Black, and Master Black Belt). The higher the belt, the more adept you are at using Six Sigma. Furthermore, one of Six Sigma’s primary tools is a 5-step method with which to complete improvement projects.

Six Sigma Ideas, Tools, and Techniques

• DMAIC. This 5-step method uses the following steps, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control to improve production processes. Furthermore, DMAIC also allows you to identify the problem and develop creative solutions through deep analysis.

• Project Charter. Six Sigma uses a single-page document to outline the process issue, project goal, scope, and a timeline. Moreover, the charter forms an essential framework for the trajectory of an improvement project.

• Pareto Chart. Pareto Charts display information about potential causes of process issues in a cascading bar chart format. Additionally, you should also organize problems from largest to smallest.

• Hypothesis Testing. Hypothesis Testing is a way of providing statistical precision to root causes of process problems, so you can make the best decisions.

• Design of Experiments. Methods of controlled testing, with which to assess how efficient processes are. DoE also allows you to select the best conditions, materials, and methods for each.

• Statistical Process Control. SPC enables you to monitor your processes, ensuring they consistently satisfy customer demand.

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