Craig W. Baird - The Six Sigma Manual for Small and Medium Businesses: What You Need to Know Explained Simply

The Six Sigma Manual for Small and Medium Businesses

What You Need to Know Explained Simply

By Craig Baird

The Six Sigma Manual for Small and Medium Businesses: What You Need to Know Explained Simply

Copyright 2009 by Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-60138-233-7

ISBN-10: 1-60138-233-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baird, Craig W., 1980

The six sigma manual for small and medium businesses : what you need to know explained simply / Craig W. Baird.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60138-233-7 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-60138-233-2 (alk. paper)

1. Small business--Management. 2. Six sigma (Quality control

standard) 3. Total quality management. I. Title.

HD62.7.B327 2009

658.4013--dc22

2008038307

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Table of Contents

Foreword

With The Six Sigma Manual for Small and Medium Businesses, Craig Baird makes the often mysterious and complex concepts and approaches of Six Sigma accessible for people engaged in making smaller companies grow and prosper.

While Six Sigma has been around for over 20 years, it has largely been embraced by larger companies. Craig makes a solid case for how small and medium businesses can and should benefit and then breaks the Six Sigma essentials into smaller topics that can be easily understood. He provides guidance on how to apply these approaches to situations that are relevant for these companies.

Introducing the terminology for Six Sigma in a straightforward way and delving into the steps involved in the DMAIC improvement process and the Lean methods with a breezy, relaxed style, this book can help anyone working for a small or medium sized business understand how Six Sigma and the DMAIC steps can help improve their financial results and satisfy, or even delight, their customers.

Recognizing the broad range products and services provided by small and medium businesses, The Six Sigma Manual for Small and Medium Businesses also provides an overview of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and Lean methods that might be very useful to some businesses.

Small and medium businesses generate the most jobs and the most growth all over the world; the opportunity to help these businesses move to a higher level of achievement, a higher level of profitability and growth, and a higher level of customer engagement through the proven Six Sigma processes this is a worthy goal.

Eric C. Maass, PhD

Director and Lead Master Black Belt, DFSS

Motorola, Inc.

Introduction

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

-Stephen Covey

What is Six Sigma?

When you go up to someone and ask him or her what Six Sigma is, this person will most likely give you a strange look, may state it is a fraternity, or may simply tell you he or she has no idea what it is.

Despite the fact that it is a revolutionary concept, Six Sigma is little understood or known by the common public.

You should not let this lack of renown bother you, because like the best secrets, those individuals who need to know about Six Sigma will know about it, and the fact you are reading this book shows that you want to know what Six Sigma can offer to you.

In the plainest terms, Six Sigma is a set of practices developed by Motorola to improve processes by eliminating defects. What is a defect? A defect is defined as anything that is nonconforming on a product or service relative to the specifications of the product or service.

The history of Six Sigma will be addressed later. Right now, the focus is on defining it.

Normally, Six Sigma will assert the following:

• Continuous efforts to reduce variation in process outputs are the key to business success.
• Manufacturing and business processes can be measured, analyzed, improved, and controlled.
• Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from everyone in the organization, including top-level management.

What do those mean? They are a bit more complicated than they need to be for an explanation, so here they are in simplified form:

• Improving customer satisfaction
• Reducing cycle time
• Reducing defects

This, then, begs the question, why is it called Six Sigma? What is Six Sigma? All of these will be addressed early in the book, but to answer the first question, Six Sigma refers to the ability of highly capable processes to output within specification. This means that processes operating with Six Sigma quality produce at defect levels of below 3.4 defects per one million opportunities. Six Sigmas goal is to improve some key processes to that level of quality or better.