Six Sigma

There´s been tons written about Six Sigma since General Electric engineers invented and perfected it as a quality management philosopy more than a decade ago. It´s all in the open literature and some sucess case stories makes for fascinating reading.

Coffeebean wrote:
"There´s been tons written about Six Sigma since General Electric engineers invented and perfected it as a quality management philosophy ... "

Actually, it was the engineers at Motorola who "invented" Six Sigma, though GE did a lot to refine and publicize it. And, speaking as a current 6 Sigma Black Belt, who was involved at another organization in several other design and quality initiatives at about the same time as Six Sigma came along, Dr Harry and his colleagues didn't so much "invent" Six Sigma methodologies as they packaged a useful set of tools borrowed from several disciplines with some catchy slogans and good marketing. (I refer to this as "working the Micro$oft model".)

That's not to say that Six Sigma doesn't work, and work quite well where you have the support of management, and honest people collecting and analyzing data. It works even better in an organization where the financial, quality, and product, process, or service offering design systems are effectively linked by realistic metrics. But in an environment like that, almost every "improvement" methodology will work.

Anna

This should get you started.

Thank you for that, it helped my day begin a gluon happier!

My one and only contact with Sixth Sigma (thank God!) was to prove to be a very nice person to work with, but the problem proved to be unfixable for him (customer service quality problems!)......he quickly found something a lot easier to do.......

We had been trying to fix the problem for many years with basically little success, so nobody was surprised really. Our customers still liked us though as we were the best in the industry still (what the rest are like I shudder to think!)

.... and then S*n M***o S*****s came along and bought out our whole company and let us all over 55 -ers go home forever, with a Golden Handshake of course!!

Now our customers are apparently really unhappy and phone me still to complain, as if I have any influence anymore!!!

...not a Bang, just a whimper.