Framing the Dialogue

With champions like General Electric, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Cisco Six Sigma has a strong presence in corporate America.  Having heard about it for years I was anxious to find out about this “revolutionary quality assurance methodology.”  Sound exciting? 

I purchased this guide by author and Six Sigma consultant George Eckes as it didn’t seem like an overly detailed account as some other books that I considered.   Six Sigma for Everyone was a pleasant surprise in that it provided a lot of  detail in such a short book, but it still was distilled in a way that made it a readable overview of the process.

The first thing that I learned was exactly what the term “six sigma” means.  It is a measure of how many unhappy customer experiences are registered for every one million opportunities.  ‘The Six Sigma level is more or less the gold standard as you would have to achieve a level of 3.4 bad customer experiences for every million opportunities (five sigma level = 233 bad, four sigma level = 6210 bad, three sigma level = 66,807 bad, two sigma level = 308,538 bad).  A Six Sigma achievement seems astounding, however, Eckes believes that most companies are at the two to three sigma levels. 

Unlike most trendy management systems a proper Six Sigma undertaking requires acceptance and work from all levels of an organization, “With Six Sigma, the work begins with management.  First executives create the Process Management system.  Before work is done that affects the average worker, management has already spent several months working on identifying and measuring the processes of their organization.”  The process relies on a comprehensive set of measurements to assess problems through the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analysis, Improve, Control) set of tactics. 

Yes there is math involved, but I was impressed with the simplified examples and how the data pushes you toward the solution.  It was interesting that Six Sigma identified a famous economic theory by Vilfredo Pareto who postulated the 80-20 rule which states that 80 percent of the world’s wealth was controlled by 20 percent of the population.  In Six Sigma it translates to 80 percent of your day is spent on 20 percent of what your job description entails.  Eckes uses a Pareto chart to identify the largest contributors so that they can be addressed first.

Eckes provides enough information to allow you to do a baseline evaluation and this book would be a useful reference for Six Sigma team members.  It is the type of system that I would hope that most companies would employ to achieve customer satisfaction.  Something also to note is that “customer” includes internal staff served by other staff and not just those who interact with outside customers.