So much has happened since the first publication of The Six Sigma Way, and it has been rewarding to find that much of what was in the book then still holds true. At the same time, the opportunity to reflect on how organizations have used, or misused, Six Sigma had offered a lot of new insights. We're pleased that this updated book will offer some real benefit to individuals and organizations still focused on driving continuous improvement today.”
Six Sigma is a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining and maximizing business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding and customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing, improving, and reinventing business process.
The most challenging question confronting business leaders and managers in the new millennium is not "How do we succeed?" It’s: "How do we stay successful?"
One virtue of Six Sigma is that it translates the messiness of variation of variation into a clear black or white measure of success: either a product or service meets customer requirements or it doesn’t. Anything that does not meet customer requirements is called a defect. [One] approach to determining a sigma level is to calculate how many defects occur per opportunities for things to go wrong. The outcome of this calculation is called Defects per Million.
Six Sigma has three basic parts, which are process improvement, process design/redesign, process management. These parts are important because these three parts affect your organization and the process that were established and are in use on a daily basis. Six Sigma teams when the project is focused on process improvement finds the critical Xs (causes) that create the unwanted Ys (defects) produced by the process.
Proactive Management : In real world though proactive management means making habits out of what we are, too often, neglected business practices; defining ambitious goals and reviewing them frequently, setting clear priorities, focus on problem prevention rather than firefighting and questioning why we do things instead of blindly defending them.
Understanding Six Sigma doesn't require any skill or background in statistics.
Processes are where the Action is: Whether focused on designing products and services, measuring performance, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction or even running the business, Six Sigma positions the process as the key vehicle of success.