Six-Sigma

Six-Sigma
Name
Institution
Six-Sigma
Six-sigma is an example of a performance measurement tool developed by the Motorola company and currently adopted by businesses such as Toyota and General Electronics. Six-sigma measurement tool was designed to analyze the quality of performance of a company striving to achieve perfection. The process is data-driven and makes use of the information collected to eliminate defects, that it, attaining the best six standard deviations between the closest specification limits and the mean in any manufacturing process. Companies that implement six-sigma within their performance evaluation and measurement system have their performance results evaluated against a standard of three variations in a group of million opportunities. In this case, the process involves the company striving to achieve 99.999% performance rate every time.
The structural design of six-sigma tool enables it to eliminate waste wastes and transforms systems in the business to produce an affordable, faster and better-performing product and services. The transformation process involves selecting objectives or goals, measuring the performance of the company against the set goals and objectives, and lastly, making adjustments so that the company achieves all the elements defined in the six-sigma. According to Garza-Reyes (2015), six-sigma tool is designed to describe how a business is performing in the market quantitatively. To attain six-sigma, he states that the process being measure must achieve a value less than 3.

4 million defects within a million opportunities. Defects, in this case, refer to anything that lowers or falls out of the customer needs. Based on Garza-Reyes (2015) ideology, six-sigma sums of chances for attaining a defect in a product or service.
Furthermore, improvement and variation reduction in a manufacturing process are achieved using the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify) sub-methodologies. DMAIC is applicable in systems with performance rates below the customer’s specifications and aims at achieving an incremental improvement. On the other hand, DMADV is applied to methods used to create product and services to improve their performance.
In summary, six-sigma is a cost-cutting process that involves creating new infrastructures that can improve the performance of all the elements in the business. Attaining efficiency improvements in an industry using six-sigma includes identifying and removing any non-value-added waste within the system without destroying the product or the service value.
References
Garza-Reyes, J. A. (2015). Green lean and the need for Six Sigma. International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, 6(3), 226-248.