ISO 9001 Compliance

Sigma – six is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola and the company has reported an impressive $17,000,000,000 in savings from Sigma – six as of 2006. AlliedSignal and General Electric were among the first to adopt the management strategy, by the turn of the century, about two-thirds of the Fortune 500 organizations had begun Sigma – six initiatives with the aim of reducing costs and improving quality.

Sigma – six is simply a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process, from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. Sigma – six is a smart management strategy that has given positive results for all that have used it.

In improving the quality of processes outputs by identification and removal of the causes of defects or errors, sigma – six uses a set of quality management methods that include statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization. There are sigma – six calculators in the market that greatly simplify calculations.

Each and every sigma – six project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets – that is the only way it can qualify to be sigma – six. These qualified financial targets are cost reduction or profit maximization.

Organizations usually adopt sigma – six methodologies to implement a measurement-based strategy that focuses on process improvement and variation reduction through the application of sigma – six improvement projects. This is possible with the use of sigma – six sub-methodologies namely DMAIC and DMADV.

DMAIC process stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control process and is a sigma – six process that is all about improvement for existing processes falling below specification and looking for incremental improvement.

DMADV process stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify process and is a sigma – six process that is an improvement system for developing new processes or products at sigma – six quality levels. DMADV can also be employed if the current process requires more than just incremental improvement.

There are many benefits of sigma – six and the major one of these is a decrease in defects that are allowed to reach the customer. Going through all the benefits would take a lot of pages, but the most significant benefits of this management strategy are financial and they are:

• Creation of additional or new revenue
• Cost savings through tax avoidance
• Faster return on investments
• An increase in cash flow
• An increase in profitability of existing products and services
• An increase in stock price or shareholder value
• Lower cost of production and servicing

Other benefits of sigma – six have been organizational and operational benefits and these include:

• Building of the company’s reputation
• Creation of new customer opportunities
• Fostering of the company’s vision and mission
• Improvement of market position relative to competitors
• Improvement in the ability to serve customers
• An increase in competitiveness and ability to charge a premium
• A decrease in employee work loads for undesirable work
• Elimination of non-value added activities
• Improvement of employee morale and team spirit
• Improvement in the use of workspace