What is Six Sigma? Streamlining quality management

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a quality management methodology used to help businesses improve current processes, products, or services by discovering and eliminating defects. The goal is to streamline quality control in manufacturing or business processes, so there’s little to no variance throughout. While Six Sigma has its origins in manufacturing to oversee quality control in production, it’s since evolved into a common business practice in industries such as technology, finance, and healthcare.

Six Sigma was trademarked by Motorola in 1993, and the name references the Greek letter sigma, which is a statistical symbol that represents a standard deviation. Motorola used the term because a Six Sigma process is expected to be defect-free 99.99966% of the time, allowing for 3.4 defective features for every million opportunities. Motorola initially set this goal for its own manufacturing operations, but it quickly became a buzzword and widely adopted standard.

Six Sigma is specifically designed to help large organizations with quality management. In 1998, GE CEO Jack Welch helped thrust Six Sigma into the limelight by donating upward of $1 million as a thank you to the company, recognizing how Six Sigma positively impacted GE’s operations, and promoting the process for large organizations. After that, Fortune 500 companies followed suit, and Six Sigma has been popular with large organizations ever since. While Six Sigma remains a popular and valuable methodology, other quality improvement frameworks have popped up in its wake, such as Agile and Lean.

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