As part of the regular management jargons thrown across to many of us, Six Sigma is one. Considering the facts that world over multinational giants are striving to deliver on quality, six sigma ensures that everything done within a company reflects a quality standard that is almost perfect.

Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps us focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. An "opportunity" is defined as a chance for nonconformance, or not meeting the required specifications. This means we need to be nearly flawless in executing our key processes. Six Sigma is a vision toward and a philosophy that is part of a committed business culture.

Key Concepts of Six Sigma

At its core, Six Sigma revolves around a few key concepts.

Critical to Quality:

Attributes most important to the customer

Defect:

Failing to deliver what the customer wants

Process Capability:

What your process can deliver

Variation:

What the customer sees and feels

Stable Operations:

Ensuring consistent, predictable processes to improve what the customer sees and feels

Design for Six Sigma:

Designing to meet customer needs and process capability

Why "Sigma"? The word is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many "defects" you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to "zero defects" as possible.

Importance of Six Sigma:

Our Customers Feel the Variance, Not the Mean

Often, inside-out view of the business is based on average or mean-based measures of our recent past. Customers don't judge us on averages, they feel the variance in each transaction, each product. Six Sigma focuses first on reducing process variation and then on improving the process capability.

Customers value consistent, predictable business processes that deliver world-class levels of quality. This is what Six Sigma strives to produce.

Globalization and instant access to information, products and services have changed the way our customers conduct business — old business models no longer work. Today's competitive environment leaves no room for error. We must delight our customers and relentlessly look for new ways to exceed their expectations. This is why Six Sigma Quality has become a part and need of a modern business quality model.

There are three key elements of quality: customer, process and employee. Everything we do to remain a world-class quality company focuses on these three essential elements.

The Customer

Delighting Customers

Customers are the center of successful businesses today: they define quality. They expect performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct transaction processing and more. In every attribute that influences customer perception, one must know that being good is not good enough. Delighting customers is a necessity. Because if you don't do it, someone else will!

...The Process

Outside-In Thinking

Quality requires us to look at the business from the customer's perspective, not ours. In other words, we must look at our processes from the outside in. By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer's needs and processes, we can discover what they are seeing and feeling. With this knowledge, we can identify areas where we can add significant value or improvement from their perspective.

... The Employee

Quality is the responsibility of every employee. Every employee must be involved, motivated and knowledgeable if we are to succeed.

The content of this article does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied on in that way. Specific advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.