Six Sigma Projects and Personal Experiences

Abstract

This climate introduces opportunities and threats and Organizations have to innovate and strive for operational excellence. Six Sigma is the most popular quality and process improvement methodology which strives for elimination of defects in the processes whose origin is traced back to the pioneering and innovation work done at Motorola and its adoption by many companies including GE, Ford, General Motors, Xerox etc. The primary objective of Six Sigma is to reduce variations, in products and processes, to achieve quality levels of less than 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). The important point to be noted is reducing the defects involve measurements in terms of millions of opportunities instead of thousands. Six Sigma is a culmination of several decades of quality improvement efforts pursued by organizations world over due to pioneering work done by quality Gurus Shewart, Deming, Juran, Crosby, Ishikawa, Taguchi and others. Dr. W. Edward Deming, who is considered by many to be the “Father of modern Quality movement”, was instrumental for transforming post war Japan into an economic giant because of helping for systematic introduction of quality improvement measures by Japanese companies. Dr. Deming had advocated popular quality improvement methods such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Plan-Do-Check-Act methodology, 14 point rules and elimination of 7 deadly sins and he helped organizations to achieve operational excellence with much customer focus. Later many US companies have gained much from Japanese experiences and ideas on quality improvement concepts.