Six Sigma Training Vs Total Quality Management

Six Sigma Training has not been developed with the intention to replace TQM.

It was developed by some of the most gifted CEO s with a view to make their business successful to the maximum extent possible - with the help of the tools and techniques of the quality profession.

Then What Is The Difference?

The difference between Six Sigma Training and TQM is best described in a word - 'management'. TQM provides broad guidelines for management. TQM is often related to the development and deployment and maintenance of organizational systems required by various processes.

Six Sigma is more for the purpose of continuous quality improvements for achieving zero defects. TQM helps in improving quality, but cannot take it ahead to continuous improvement. One major difference is visible in the approach.

TQM is more about conformance to internal requirements. Six Sigma focuses on continuous improvement and reduction in defects. The Six Sigma project is driven by the benefits from the viewpoint of the stakeholders, customers, shareholders and employees.

The outcome for both the systems is the same, achievement of better quality products. Six Sigma, however, has an edge here. It focuses on a reduction in defects and satisfying the specifications of the customers. Additionally, Six Sigma Training also helps reduce operational costs.

It achieves this by reduction in cycle time, reduction in defects and cost savings - but not at the cost of the quality and value of the product. Costs that provide no value to the customers are eliminated. Such costs may be those incurred due to waste.

TQM is generally an initiative taken up at individual operational levels, and may not be within the same processes. Six Sigma, on the other hand, aims at improving all operations in a single business process. For such projects, skilled and certified professionals are required such as Black Belts and Green Belts.

There are some team members who may be working part-time on their regular activities along with these projects. They aim at achieving the strategic goals and objectives and aligning the projects to the organizational goals. TQM projects do not necessarily need any specialists. These activities can be managed by non-dedicated managers along with their regular workloads.

Six Sigma team members work temporarily on such projects. The TQM goals are set by the quality department and are based on the assumption that the criteria are good for the quality as well as the organization. They are projects motivated by quality philosophy and undertaken by quality professionals.

Six Sigma projects start with a pre-planned project charter and with an outline of targets, highlighting prospective financial benefits and savings. Very often, organizations have implemented TQM projects without any idea of the financial benefits. The focus of TQM is on quality and performing to the standards, whereas Six Sigma focus is on strategic goals - and the metrics are based on these objectives and goals.

There are significant differences between TQM and Six Sigma - and though some tools and techniques of TQM and Six Sigma are similar, Six Sigma often has a distinct use for these tools. It seems as if Six Sigma will be more popular and achieve more that TQM.

Source: ezinearticles.com/?Six-Sigma-Training-Vs-Total-Quality-Management

Six Sigma Methods

Six Sigma has two key methods: DMAIC and DMADV, both inspired by Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle. DMAIC is used to improve an existing business process; DMADV is used to create new product or process designs.

DMAIC
The basic method consists of the following five steps:

Define high-level project goals and the current process.
Measure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data.
Analyze the data to verify cause-and-effect relationships. Determine what the relationships are, and attempt to ensure that all factors have been considered.
Improve or optimize the process based upon data analysis using techniques like Design of experiments.
Control to ensure that any deviations from target are corrected before they result in defects. Set up pilot runs to establish process capability, move on to production, set up control mechanisms and continuously monitor the process.

DMADV
The basic method consists of the following five steps:

Define design goals that are consistent with customer demands and the enterprise strategy.
Measure and identify CTQs (characteristics that are Critical To Quality), product capabilities, production process capability, and risks.
Analyze to develop and design alternatives, create a high-level design and evaluate design capability to select the best design.
Design details, optimize the design, and plan for design verification. This phase may require simulations.
Verify the design, set up pilot runs, implement the production process and hand it over to the process owners.
DMADV is also known as DFSS, an abbreviation of "Design For Six Sigma".

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

Sigma levels

Short-term sigma levels correspond to the following long-term DPMO values (one-sided):

1 sigma = 690,000 DPMO = 31% efficiency
2 sigma = 308,000 DPMO = 69.2% efficiency
3 sigma = 66,800 DPMO = 93.32% efficiency
4 sigma = 6,210 DPMO = 99.379% efficiency
5 sigma = 230 DPMO = 99.977% efficiency
6 sigma = 3.4 DPMO = 99.9997% efficiency

These figures assume that the process mean will shift by 1.5 sigma towards the side with the critical specification limit some time after the initial study determining the short-term sigma level. The figure given for 1 sigma, for example, assumes that the long-term process mean will be 0.5 sigma beyond the specification limit, rather than 1 sigma within it, as it was in the short-term study.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

Origin and meaning of the term "six sigma process"

Sigma (the lower-case Greek letter σ) is used to represent the standard deviation (a measure of variation) of a statistical population. The term "six sigma process" comes from the notion that if one has six standard deviations between the process mean and the nearest specification limit, there will be practically no items that fail to meet specifications. This is based on the calculation method employed in process capability studies.

In a capability study, the number of standard deviations between the process mean and the nearest specification limit is given in sigma units. As process standard deviation goes up, or the mean of the process moves away from the center of the tolerance, fewer standard deviations will fit between the mean and the nearest specification limit, decreasing the sigma number and increasing the likelihood of items outside specification.

Role of the 1.5 sigma shift

Experience has shown that in the long term, processes usually do not perform as well as they do in the short. As a result, the number of sigmas that will fit between the process mean and the nearest specification limit is likely to drop over time, compared to an initial short-term study. To account for this real-life increase in process variation over time, an empirically-based 1.5 sigma shift is introduced into the calculation. According to this idea, a process that fits six sigmas between the process mean and the nearest specification limit in a short-term study will in the long term only fit 4.5 sigmas – either because the process mean will move over time, or because the long-term standard deviation of the process will be greater than that observed in the short term, or both.

Hence the widely accepted definition of a six sigma process is one that produces 3.4 defective parts per million opportunities (DPMO). This is based on the fact that a process that is normally distributed will have 3.4 parts per million beyond a point that is 4.5 standard deviations above or below the mean (one-sided capability study). So the 3.4 DPMO of a "Six Sigma" process in fact corresponds to 4.5 sigmas, namely 6 sigmas minus the 1.5 sigma shift introduced to account for long-term variation. This is designed to prevent underestimation of the defect levels likely to be encountered in real-life operation.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

Historical overview (Six Sigma)

Six Sigma was originally developed as a set of practices designed to improve manufacturing processes and eliminate defects, but its application was subsequently extended to other types of business processes as well.In Six Sigma, a defect is defined as anything that could lead to customer dissatisfaction.

The particulars of the methodology were first formulated by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986. Six Sigma was heavily inspired by six preceding decades of quality improvement methodologies such as quality control, TQM, and Zero Defects, based on the work of pioneers such as Shewhart, Deming, Juran, Ishikawa, Taguchi and others.

Like its predecessors, Six Sigma asserts that –

Continuous efforts to achieve stable and predictable process results (i.e. reduce process variation) are of vital importance to business success.
Manufacturing and business processes have characteristics that can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled.
Achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management.
Features that set Six Sigma apart from previous quality improvement initiatives include –

A clear focus on achieving measurable and quantifiable financial returns from any Six Sigma project.
An increased emphasis on strong and passionate management leadership and support.
A special infrastructure of "Champions," "Master Black Belts," "Black Belts," etc. to lead and implement the Six Sigma approach.
A clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data, rather than assumptions and guesswork.
The term "Six Sigma" is derived from a field of statistics known as process capability studies. Originally, it referred to the ability of manufacturing processes to produce a very high proportion of output within specification. Processes that operate with "six sigma quality" over the short term are assumed to produce long-term defect levels below 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). Six Sigma's implicit goal is to improve all processes to that level of quality or better.

Six Sigma is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola, Inc. Motorola has reported over US$17 billion in savings from Six Sigma as of 2006.

Other early adopters of Six Sigma who achieved well-publicized success include Honeywell (previously known as AlliedSignal) and General Electric, where the method was introduced by Jack Welch. By the late 1990s, about two-thirds of the Fortune 500 organizations had begun Six Sigma initiatives with the aim of reducing costs and improving quality.

In recent years, Six Sigma has sometimes been combined with lean manufacturing to yield a methodology named Lean Six Sigma

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a business management strategy, initially implemented by Motorola, that today enjoys widespread application in many sectors of industry.

Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and variation in manufacturing and business processes.[1] It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization ("Black Belts" etc.) who are experts in these methods.[1] Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction or profit increase)

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

Optimizing Six Sigma at the Top of the World

Here’s a story that proves once again that exciting quality applications can occur anywhere in the world.

BHP Billiton operates the EKATI Diamond Mine in Canada’s Northwest Territo­ries, approximately 200 miles northeast of Yellowknife—just below the Arctic Circle. Arctic winter gear designed for temperature well below -45°C is standard attire during the long winters, when the sun barely rises above the horizon. Although the setting is harsh, it can also be a beautiful place to observe and enjoy a truly unique perspective on nature.

EKATI is proud of its commitment to become the safest, lowest-cost pro­ducer of quality diamonds in the world. Employees at EKATI are passionate about creating a safe and sustainable business and thriving communities, as well as developing people. This business strives to select, develop, and retain the right people while extracting value from low-value ores. The business drivers are to create zero harm, increase margin per ton, and create an engaged workforce.

In 2007, a new management team at the EKATI mine kicked off a lean Six Sigma deployment that utilized a five-year plan to drive breakthrough improvements. How­ever, as for so many organizations, EKATI was also challenged with accurately and easily tracking and archiving improvement programs. Keeping tabs on and archiving the mine’s various quality improvement initiatives using spreadsheets was a time-consuming challenge—thus the need for an enterprisewide software tracking system.

In an environment in which saving just a few dollars per ton of mined diamonds is considered a major success, there is a profound need for extremely accurate tracking of the financial benefits of proj­ects. Tracking and validating bottom-line value in the current recession is critical and allows for control and the ability to maneuver with a lean Six Sigma work­force.

“You always need tracking for what’s in existence and what isn’t,” says Aart Broekhuizen, business excellence manager at BHP Billiton’s EKATI mine. “You need to see the different phases of projects, and you want to have some understanding of the past performance of projects in case it’s needed for future reference, as well as being able to track and sustain the bottom line and continuously enhance business processes and systems.”

With this stated objective in mind, and after a diligent search of avail­able options, Broekhuizen and the rest of the mine’s quality excellence team decided to entrust the tracking soft­ware portion of their Six Sigma pro­gram to EnterpriseTrack from Instantis Inc. of Santa Clara, California. Instantis is an on-demand provider of project management solutions, and EnterpriseTrack is a full-featured, web-based solu­tion that allows companies to initiate, track, and manage Six Sigma and other performance initiatives across the entire organization.

Adaptability is one of the key fea­tures of EnterpriseTrack. “The degree of configurability was a key issue,” says Howard Pujol, strategic engagement manager at Instantis. “BHP Billiton EKATI management knew what they wanted, and were very clear on the functionality that they desired.”

For example, mine management quickly discovered that the software helped tie together often disparate elements of the organization into a unified whole. “We designed how best to use the software in meetings with our management team, Master Black Belts, and Black Belts,” says Broekhuizen. “The whole thing is a process of engagement and enrol­ment—the belts and their teams will work on projects, and the software also brings in the finance department to track and validate monetary value.”

EnterpriseTrack has proven handy for document tracking, and users have the ability to sort and find a single project, instantly uncover the status of that project, look at the timeline, and ana­lyze metrics and benchmarks. The user can standardize exactly how he or she wishes to track and handle the granular information uncovered in the “Analyze” phase of a Six Sigma implementation. Ten fully integrated modules, including Strategy Manager, Process Manager, Idea Manager, Proposal Manager, Projects Manager, Knowledge Manager, Metrics Manager, and VOC Manager, all of which plug into EnterpriseTrack’s world-class dashboards and reports, offer a complete view into the deployment, from top to bottom.

Benefits:

• Web-based solution that initiates, tracks, and manages Six Sigma and other per­formance initiatives for organizations in a wide variety of industries.
• Highly flexible and adaptable
• Collects inputs from various sectors of the organization and makes it easy to track status of projects.

Source: qualitydigest.com/inside