Today’s competitive business environment leaves no room for error. We must continually give total satisfaction to our customers and relentlessly look for new ways to exceed their expectations. This is why Six Sigma quality has become a part of our culture.
Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps us focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. 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.
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 |
Customers value consistent and predictable business processes that deliver world-class levels of quality. This is what Six Sigma strives to produce.
There are three key elements of quality: Customer, Process & Employee
The Customer: The customer expects continuously good performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct transaction processing and more. For every attribute that influences customer perception, we know that just being good is not enough. Delighting our customers is a necessity, because we know that if we do not do it, someone else will!
The Process: Quality requires us to look at our business from the customer’s perspective, not ours. By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer’s needs and processes, we can understand 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: People create results. All our employees are trained in the strategy, statistical tools and techniques of Six Sigma quality.