Six Sigma Strategy

By Dr. Asad Ullah Yousafzai

 What is six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a rigorous, focused, and highly effective implementation of proven quality
principles and techniques
It is a statistical methodology used to reduce variation and eliminate defects in business
transactions and processes.
Six sigma is aimed at increasing the profitability by reducing errors and waste in business
processes and improving quality.
is a Greek alphabet and it represents Standard Deviation or defects/errors in production
process
6 means a production process is having 3.4 defects per million parts
Usually companies operate at 3 or 4 sigma which result in 67000 to 6200 defects per million
parts.
 Lean Six Sigma

Lean is a process which doesnt have waste

There are seven kinds of wastes as identified by Lean Toyota Production System
Motion: movement of people during job. going to printer, photocopier, moving between offices,
looking for missing information
Transportation: Conveyance of any products or documents that dont add value
Waiting: for parts or information e.g. waiting for approvals, waiting for clarification
Overproduction: producing too much or too soon e.g. printing more than needed, any processing
without actual demand
Inventory keeping raw materials, inputs more than needed
Over processing: doing redundant activities, generating reports that are unused
Rework due to not doing something right the first time
Popularity of Six Sigma

The roots of six sigma lie in control charts for manufacturing processes introduced by
Walter Shewhart in 1924
Bill Smith introduced the concept of Six sigma at Motorola in 1986 and Bob Galvin the
then CEO of Motorola got popular because of implementing six sigma in Motorola
corp.
Later in 1995 General Electric implemented the strategy to save more than 8 billion
USD annually by reducing defects in their products
Since then, Six Sigma is used by most fortune 500 companies.
Why use sigma as unit of defects

99.38 % corresponds to 4 sigma level and it means 6200 defects per million
opportunities
In case of GE, operating at 4 Sigma would have costed them 8 billion USD
So there is a need for another measure to define deviation from standard procedure
Six sigma is equal to 99.9997 % defects free production process
 How it works?

Six sigma is based on DMAIC process

Define the goals of improvement activity or customer expectations
Measure the size of the problem in existing system
Analyze the existing process to identify the gaps and ways to eliminate the gaps
Improve the process by eliminating the gaps and removing redundant activities
Control the new system by removing the deviations from new procedures
Value Stream Mapping

Its a flow chart of all the activities in a production process

A value stream contains all actions and process steps, which are required to create a
product or service
It provides common understanding of current state and helps identify waste and
opportunities for improvement
Benefits of six sigma

Faster processes
Improved quality
Increased customer satisfaction
Cost saving/increased profitability
Improved employee morale
 Challenge

An online shopping website is receiving complaints about

prolonged waiting time when they call the customer care
center. There are 1000 customer care center agents and
they receive thousands of calls everyday. Each agent is
given all the information regarding the products/services
of the company. The calls are received randomly by the
agents. How will you apply the six sigma concept to
improve the situation?