Six Sigma Professor

            Motorola and General Electric; what do these two companies have in common? Some might say that these companies have nothing in common; when in fact, these two companies follow the very same guidelines to achieving their business. Globalization and the internet have placed information, products, and services at our finger tips. With competition at an all time high, there really is no room for error. Thus, causing Motorola and General Electric to both use a system known as Six Sigma.

            Motorola invented Six Sigma in 1986. As described by Motorola, “Six Sigma is a metric for measuring defects and improving quality. Since then, it has evolved to a robust business improvement methodology that focuses an organization on customer requirements, process alignment, analytical rigor and timely execution. ” (Six Sigma Dictionary). Six Sigma consists of several key concepts such as quality, defect, process capability, variation, and operations. The three most important concepts being quality, defect, and process capabilities because these are the blocks that help build the rest of Six Sigma.

Customer satisfaction is a key part of this entire process. The quality of the company’s product or service has to be near-perfect. Bill Smith states the quality level represents only 3. 4 defects per million opportunities. With defects having to be close to perfect it is important to have employee’s that use quality thinking in a timely manner. As a leader in the Six Sigma, it is important to place a time frame on the employee’s to minimize the amount of defects in the process. In a nut shell, Six Sigma starts by reducing variation, improving process capability, and having processes capable of consistent high quality levels. General Electric states that “the central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many “defects” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to ‘zero’ defects as possible. ” (Making Customers Feel Quality).

            Secondly, Six Sigma can be applied to specific departments or to entire businesses. As mentioned by Motorola, Six Sigma can be used in many different industries that need to increase market share, improve customer retention, accelerate innovation, and manage changing customer requirements. For these more complex scenarios added measures are needed to be taken. The first step; according to Motorola, is to assign executives to the correct tasks and create improvement teams to be associated with each task. By creating an improvement team, the company will get accelerated results. According to Six Sigma, if the improvement team was successful, than the team would have used the DMADV or DMAIC frameworks. The DMADV framework stands for define requirements, measure performance, analyze relationships, design solutions, and verify functionality. The DMAIC framework stands for define opportunity, measure performance, analyze opportunity, improve performance, and control performance. With either of these frameworks being used then the improvement team would have sustained overall improvement for these complex scenarios.

            In Conclusion, Six Sigma is used world-wide in today’s global competitive marketplace. Six Sigma is used to decrease the amount of error made in decisions in this fast moving economy for both simplistic and complex tasks. Finally, Six Sigma allows employees and executives to work hand-in-hand using statistical procedures to make fast, consistent, quality decisions.