Six Sigma – Latest Quality Revolution

I have been in the quality profession for a decade and a half.  Long enough to see many “new” and “revolutionary” quality processes come and go.  Each is usually championed by someone who made a great deal of money.  The latest and greatest quality revelation is Six Sigma.  At the American Quality Congress 2000, over one-third of the exhibitors focused on Six Sigma.  Until a decade ago, it was only Deming, Juran and Crosby!  Even the Juran Institute now offers Six Sigma!!

A prediction: Six Sigma will not last forever.  Just as zero defects, quality circles, reengineering and so many other programmes did not last forever.  But like those initiatives, Six Sigma will have a lasting impact on quality management because it has focused much needed management attention on quality.  It has also caught the attention of the press and senior executives.  So, regardless of your opinion about Six Sigma, it is tough not to concede the impact that Six Sigma is having on business.

Although Motorola developed the system, Six Sigma is being successfully promoted by Mikel Harry, president of the Six Sigma Academy (and numerous other consultants).  Harry was one of the architects of Six Sigma within Motorola and is co-author of the best-selling book Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporation.  He has successfully followed the tried and tested model pioneered by Tom Peters, Robert Camp and Steven Covey:  package a concept, write a book about it, and intensively market the book and yourself.  Harry has had a great deal of help from the American Society for Quality, which has partnered with the Six Sigma Academy to provide Six Sigma training and consulting.

Six Sigma is a quality philosophy based on setting attainable short-term goals while striving for long-term objectives.  It uses customer-focused goals and measurements to drive continuous improvement at all levels in any enterprise.  The long-term objective is to develop and implement processes so robust that defects are measured at levels of only a few per million opportunities.

Further, Six Sigma provides a measure that applies to both product and service activities: defects per million opportunities (DPMO).  Historically, we discussed the capabilities of a business process in statistical terms as meeting three sigma.  This refers to a process in which the average (mean) is fixed and the variability (sigma) when multiplied by plus and minus three sigma, encompasses 99.73 per cent of the operations.  Thus, three sigma capability would contain 0.27 per cent defects.  Assuming that the mean will shift by one and a half sigma, the measure would be 66,807 DPMO.  A process of four sigma would contain 6,210 DPMO, and a six sigma process would contain 3.4 DPMO.

The number 3.4 DPMO is so small that it is perceived as “virtual perfection”.  The fact that 3.4 DPMO is not zero allows people to buy into Six Sigma intellectually.  Probably, they are willing to strive for three parts per million because it is finite.  Check it out with Suresh Krishna, Sundram Fasteners, Chennai.  Sundram Fasteners has won the best vendor award from General Motors for four (or is it five?) years in a row.  With a track record exceeding “virtual perfection”, with or without Six Sigma.

As in the case of Sundram Fasteners, organizations should look at the holistic nature of Six Sigma and not just concentrate on training a lot of people.  The key discriminator is becoming service quality.  This discrimination is a synthesis of the hardware, software and service reliability and accessibility – in short, its user friendliness, its ability to satisfy and delight customers.  I predict that even if it is called something else, say Qc3, the drive toward defining operations that affect service quality, providing metrics for these operations, and then striving to improve them in the same way we drive product quality, will be one of the most significant aspects of the quality movement in this decade.