Discussion Board Thread
Re: Six Sigma
Definition:
Organizational Leadership and Management defines the Six Sigma processes as “focus on saving time, improving quality and lowering costs by improving the quality of outputs, identifying and removing the cause of defects, and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes.”
Satterlee, Anita (2013). Organizational Leadership and Management: A Christian Perspective. (2nd ed.) Raleigh, NC: Synergistics International Inc.
Summary:
The authors of the article “Six Sigma, organizational learning and innovation: An integration and empirical examination” are Michael Sony and Subhash Naik. Michael Sony works at the Department of Electricity in Navelim, India and Subhash Naik at the Vedanta Organization in Panaji, India. In their article, they investigate the relationship between Six Sigma, organizational learning, and innovation performance. They also provide models to help explain the relationship among the three.
Discussion:
Six sigma has been around since the Motorola Company introduced it in the 1960s. Their goal was to improve customer satisfaction, decrease product defects and increase efficiency and effectiveness (Satterlee, 2013, p. 226). Since its inception, popularity of Six Sigma has spread and numerous organizations have implemented it into their organizations.
The most accepted definition of Six Sigma is a process that produces 3.4 defects per million opportunities. However, many business do not operate at this level. The levels of Six Sigma are Three Sigma, Four Sigma, Five Sigma, and Six Sigma. At the lowest level, organizational proficiency is the lowest. As a company’s proficiency improves, their Sigma levels grow. The Improvement model used in Six Sigma to increase proficiency levels is called DMAIC.
DMAIC is a five step process that assists an organization improve their levels of proficiency. The first step to DMAIC is to define the purpose, scope and outputs and...