Lean Six Sigma Certification? - One Size Does Not Fit All

“Six Sigma” originated as a set of practices designed to improve manufacturing processes and eliminate defects, but its application was subsequently extended to other types of business processes as well. In Six Sigma, a defect is defined as any process output that does not meet customer specifications, or that could lead to creating an output that does not meet customer specifications.

The core of Six Sigma was “born” at Motorola in the 1970s out of senior executive Art Sundry's criticism of Motorola’s bad quality. As a result of this criticism, the company discovered a connection between increases in quality and decreases in costs of production. At that time, the prevailing view was that quality costs extra money. In fact, it reduced total costs by driving down the costs for repair or control. Jim Smith subsequently formulated the particulars of the methodology at Motorola in 1986. Six Sigma was heavily inspired by the quality improvement methodologies of the six preceding decades, such as quality control, Total Quality Management (TQM), and Zero Defects based on the work of pioneers such as Shewhart, Deming, Juran, Crosby, Ishikawa, Taguchi, and others.

Like its predecessors, Six Sigma doctrine asserts that:

· Continuous efforts to achieve stable and predictable process results (i.e., reduce process variation) are of vital importance to business success.

· Manufacturing and business processes have characteristics that can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled.

· Achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management.

Features that set Six Sigma apart from previous quality improvement initiatives include:

· A clear focus on achieving measurable and quantifiable financial returns from any Six Sigma project.

· An increased emphasis on strong and passionate management leadership and support.

· A special infrastructure of "Champions", "Master Black Belts", "Black Belts", "Green Belts", "Red Belts" etc. to lead and implement the Six Sigma approach.

· A clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data, rather than assumptions and guesswork.

The term "Six Sigma" comes from a field of statistics known as process capability studies. Originally, it referred to the ability of manufacturing processes to produce a very high proportion of output within specification. Processes that operate with "six sigma quality" over the short term are assumed to produce long-term defect levels below 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). Six Sigma's implicit goal is to improve all processes to that level of quality or better.

Six Sigma is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola Inc. As of 2006^[update]Motorola reported over US$17 billion in savings from Six Sigma. Other early adopters of Six Sigma who achieved well-publicized success include Honeywell (previously known as Allied Signal) and General Electric, where Jack Welch introduced the method. By the late 1990s, about two-thirds of the Fortune 500 organizations had begun Six Sigma initiatives with the aim of reducing costs and improving quality.

In recent years^[update], some practitioners have combined Six Sigma ideas with lean manufacturing to create a methodology named Lean Six Sigma. The Lean Six Sigma methodology views lean manufacturing, which addresses process flow and waste issues, and Six Sigma, with its focus on variation and design, as complementary disciplines aimed at promoting "business and operational excellence". Companies such as IBM use Lean Six Sigma to focus transformation efforts not just on efficiency but also on growth. It serves as a foundation for innovation throughout the organization, from manufacturing and software development to sales and service delivery functions. Although a cumbersome change to institute, many hospitals and large healthcare facilities are now adopting this Lean Six Sigma culture, replacing the even more behemoth Total Quality Management (TQM) "ball and chain" that has ruled their world in the past.

Six Sigma mostly finds application in large organizations. An important factor in the spread of Six Sigma was GE's 1998 announcement of $350 million in savings thanks to Six Sigma, a figure that later grew to more than $1 billion. Industry consultants like Thomas Pyzdek and John Kullmann dictate that smaller companies with fewer than 500 employees are less suited to Six Sigma implementation, or at the very least should adapt only the standard approach to see if it would work for them. This is due both to the infrastructure of the training belt hierarchy that Six Sigma requires, and to the fact that large organizations present more opportunities for the kinds of improvements Six Sigma is suited to bringing about.

Also, it is the fact that smaller companies must truly change their entire culture and every single employee must be enthusiastic and willing to devote their entire working day and job tasks to Six Sigma goals; a time-consuming, very invasive and daunting task. If just one out of 10 employees is not continuously encorporating the process into their workday, the entire result would be eliminated. We can, however, take away the lessons learned from Six Sigma and apply them to small business operations; streamlining their business processes and work-flow.

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