TQM: Six Sigma

If you are someone in the market with the idea that you are one day going to be the best, you then need to make sure about one thing and that is, being proactive rather than reactive. Otherwise, the guy in the proactive seat is going to just drive past at an alarming speed and leave you wondering what did you do wrong?

If you have started to wonder what do I mean by being proactive and reactive? Read on, in order to answer this, people like Edward Deming, Eliyahu Goldratt, James and Champy, John Welch have spent their lives to come up with the right answer and to their utter disappointment, every time they have come close to answering it, someone somewhere just changed the questions.

It all started with the slogan, Total Quality Management (TQM as most of us know it). With this came man’s flirtations with the idea of having things done right the first time instead of setting it right the second time; yet men have had two world wars and still haven’t managed to get the global political scenario to look any better.

This is where Motorola in the 1980s copy/pasted the 1920s concept of Statistical Process control. They called it Six Sigma (6S). The purpose of 6sigma is to reduce process variation to the point that all goods and services provided meet or exceed customer expectations. Mathematically, 3.4 defects per one million occurrences, or this is what it’s supposed to look like.

The Concept

The concept of 6 sigma is a more “Frankenstein” of my theory on output. Its something like this, in order to have a quality output you need to have quality input and since output is never a hundred percent, therefore, the input has to be a hundred and fifty percent to maybe achieve ninety nine percent in the output.



The term "six sigma process" comes from the thought that if there are six check points or six indicators or six standard deviations (statistically speaking) between the process mean (in statistics, mean means average) and the nearest specification limit and these limits signify the tolerance in error of the output resulting from a process the company has set for itself as shown in the graph below, then practically no items will ever fail to meet specifications. This is based on the calculation method employed in process capability studies.





Graph taken from Wikipedia
USL = Upper Specification Limit
LSL = Lower Specification Limit

Capability studies measure the number of standard deviations between the process mean and the nearest specification limit in sigma units. As process standard deviation goes up, or the mean of the process moves away from the center of the tolerance, fewer standard deviations will fit between the mean and the nearest specification limit, decreasing the sigma number and increasing the likelihood of items outside specification

How does Six Sigma Work?

There are three elements of 6sigma

1. Process improvement
2. Process design/re-design
3. Process management

Let’s look at each of them, briefly

Process improvement

The main idea of process improvement really is to pluck out the root causes of performance deficiencies in processes that exist in the organization. These performance deficiencies may be the real problems or may be preventing it from working as efficiently and effectively as it could. To eliminate these deficiencies a five-step approach is used.

Define – a problem is identified and a team is formed with the responsibility and resources for solving the problem.

Measure – data that describes accurately how the process is working currently is gathered and analysed in order to produce some preliminary ideas about what might be causing the problem.

Analyse – based upon these preliminary ideas, theories are generated as to what might be causing the problem and, by testing these theories, root causes are identified.

Improve – root causes are removed by means of designing and implementing changes to the offending process.

Control – new controls are designed and implemented to prevent the original problem from returning and to hold the gains made by the improvement.

 

Process design/re-design



Sometimes simply improving existing processes is not enough, and, therefore, new processes will need to be designed, or existing processes will need to be re-designed. There are several reasons why this could be necessary:

• An organization may choose to replace, rather than repair, one or more of its core processes.
• An organization discovers, during an improvement project, that simply improving an existing process will never deliver the level of quality its customers are demanding.
• An organization identifies an opportunity to offer an entirely new product or service.

As with process improvement, a five-step approach is used to design/re-design a process:

Define – identify the goals for the new process, taking into account the customer requirements.

Match – develop a set of performance requirements for the new process that match these goals.



Analyse – carry out an analysis of these performance requirements for the new process, and based upon this produce an outline design for the new process.

Design & Implement – work this outline design up into a detailed design for the new process, and then implement it.

Verify – make sure the new process performs as required and introduce controls to ensure it keeps performing that way.



Process management

Because it requires a fundamental change in the way an organization is structured and managed, process management is often the most challenging and time-consuming part of Six Sigma.

In general, process management consists of:

• Defining processes, key customer requirements, and process “owners”.
• Measuring performance against customer requirements and key performance indicators.
• Analyzing data to enhance measures and refine the process management mechanisms.
• Controlling process performance by monitoring process inputs, process operation, and process outputs, and responding quickly to problems and process variations.

This is the first on the series on TQM, in subsequent posts, will be talking of many other concepts that we have heard of but not really sure what they are. Happy Reading.