Six Sigma

:For the 1960s rhythm and blues band, see Sigma 6

Related Topics:
1960s - Rhythm and blues - Sigma 6

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Six Sigma is a quality management program to achieve "six sigma" levels of quality. It was pioneered at Motorola in the mid-1980s by Bob Galvin, who succeeded his father and Motorola founder, Paul Galvin, as head of the company, and by Motorola engineer Bill Smith. It has since spread to many other manufacturing companies, including GE, Honeywell, Raytheon, Seagate Technology, and Microsoft. However, it can be applied wherever the control of variation is desired. In recent years, it has begun to branch out into the service industry, and in 2000, Fort Wayne, Indiana became the first city to implement the program in a city government. Some, claiming that Six Sigma's impact has not yet been fully realized, advocate an open source approach so that the principles of Six Sigma might be more widely adopted.

Related Topics:
Quality management - Quality - Motorola - 1980s - Bob Galvin - Paul Galvin - Bill Smith - Manufacturing - GE - Honeywell - Raytheon - Seagate Technology - Microsoft - 2000 - Fort Wayne - Indiana - City - Government - Open source

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In statistics, sigma refers to the standard deviation of a set of data; "six sigma", therefore, refers to six standard deviations. Mathematically, assuming that defects occur according to a standard normal distribution, this corresponds to approximately two quality failures per billion parts manufactured. In practical application of the Six Sigma methodology, however, the rate is taken to be 3.4 per million; see below. Initially, many believed that such high process reliability was impossible, and three sigmas (67,000 defects per million opportunities, or DPMO) was considered acceptable. However, market leaders have measurably reached six sigmas in numerous processes.

Related Topics:
Standard deviation - Standard normal distribution

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