Looking for an edge in a competitive global market, business leaders created Six Sigma to put an emphasis on identifying and eliminating waste, variation, defects and errors and developing a culture of continuous process improvement.

For those interested in Six Sigma, a short history on the methodology can prove illuminating. Founded on principles that began with mathematicians and adopted for American businesses in the late 20th century, Six Sigma has an interesting origin that involves people trying to find ways to make all types of processes more efficient and give customers better products.

What Is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology that focuses on meeting the needs of customers while increasing profitability. This requires developing sustainable business strategies that increase efficiency while also creating products and services that better satisfy customers.

Over the years, Six Sigma practitioners have developed a wide range of techniques to make the approach to these efforts uniform and driven by strategies that have proven successful over many years. In general, Six Sigma strives to:

  • Identify a problem
  • Collect data on the process in which the problem is occurring
  • Develop potential data-driven solutions to the problem
  • Test the solutions to find the best option
  • Create a system that sustains a long-term solution
  • Measure the results and adjust as needed

That’s the approach, in general terms. Of course, it becomes much more specific as you learn the tools involved with Six Sigma.

Why Is It Called Six Sigma?

One sigma is one standard deviation. Most experts credit American physicist, engineer and statistician Walter Shewhart for first determining that anything that deviates three sigma from the mean needs improvement.

Six Sigma calls for bringing operations to a “six sigma” level, which means 3.4 defects for every one million opportunities. Through continuous process improvement and refining processes, organizations use the tools and techniques of Six Sigma to produce stable and predictable results.

Where Did Six Sigma First Get Used?

At Motorola in the 1980s, Mikel Harry and Bill Smith developed Six Sigma to make improvements on the manufacturing floor. Motorola was among the first recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige Award. Jack Welch later adopted Six Sigma at General Electric and saved billions of dollars putting the methodology to use.

When Is Six Sigma Used?

The question really is more, “When isn’t it?” Because of its focus on improving processes, Six Sigma is applicable to operations on the manufacturing floor, the processes of project teams and the work of an individual. People can even apply Six Sigma to their own home life. It’s a proven technique that works in a variety of situations.

How Does Six Sigma Help Process Improvement?

Any tool or technique in Six Sigma can get analyzed to show how it improves a process. But one of the most used methods in Six Sigma is DMAIC, a step-by-step process that allows users to make improvements to a current process by using data and objective problem solving.

The phases of DMAIC include the following:

Define – A project team uses a team charter to select team members, choose the process being improved and define the project objectives.

Measure – The team collects data on the process. One of the areas of focus is finding variance in a process. One of the main objectives of Six Sigma is to target and eliminate variance.

Analyze – A data-driven approach is taken to finding potential solutions to whatever problems have been identified. This is an area where a variety of Six Sigma tools can come into play, including regression analysis and variance analysis.

Improve – In this phase, the team sifts through all possible solutions and finds the best one, often launching a pilot program to test the solution.

Control – The project implements the solution and monitors the result to ensure it meets expectations.