Quality Focus Paper: Six Sigma

Quality Focus Paper: Six Sigma

Quality Focus Paper:   Six Sigma


Introduction

When learning about quality concepts in the business world, you’ve probably heard about TQM, also known as total quality management, or about ISO9000 developed by the International Standards Organization, or about the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, which is awarded by the president of the United States to a company that has proven to achieve quality among their organization.   The new quality concept that has hit the streets in the past couple of decades of Six Sigma, and it is causing a huge stir among upper management in the business world.  
Six Sigma is a structured system of principles that is used by organizations to help improve the processes they use to conduct business, manufacture products, or execute customer service (4).   The idea of Six Sigma is to find the steps or objects in the system that are broken, identify how important they are, and then find and immediately apply the solutions to fix the issue.   Organizations want to find these issues in their processes and fix them so that they may reduce costs, increase sales, develop products faster so they reach the market faster, and ultimately achieve high customer satisfaction.  
The history of Six Sigma begins back in 1809, when Carl Gauss introduced his concept of the normal curve, as know as the Gaussian curve, which illustrates the data of several processes (2).   Six Sigma is the result of the combination of many quality initiatives, such as TQM and Simplified Process Control (SPC), integrated with the concept of the normal curve.   In the 1980s, Motorola was first organization to truly embrace the concept of Six Sigma, and they also assisted in developed the true concept & meaning of Six Sigma (2).   At the time, Motorola’s measured its quality efforts in defects-per-thousand, but felt that it wasn’t enough.   They felt that the low measurements obtained in the defects-per-thousands would falsely lead people to believe that they were...