The Six Sigma Approach

Marketing and Logistics disciplines are akin to each other. They all strive to satisfy and delight customers in ways such as reliability, availability of products, faster delivery, right quality and the overall customer care. Most of my posts have been about Marketing, but this time round, I'd like to share with you, my dear reader, about my other field of study (Logistics), and concentrate more on the "Six Sigma Approach". This concept, developed years ago by the Motorola Company, strives to achieve the right quality of products by reducing the variation of defects in the production process and the products themselves. It involves setting quality objectives, in which a process should have a variation of positive/negative 3, meaning that there can only be a maximum of 6 defects if a million opportunities to produce were provided. This concept greatly relies on customer driven objectives, which emphasizes that the customer should determine what quality means to them. It also relies heavily on the element of a structured improvement cycle, which keeps the process of production a continuous cycle that strives to improve the quality of products. The concept uses a number of measures to calculate the number, fraction and percentage of defects in a product and in a production process. To me, it is an important concept since it helps organizations to continuously improve on the quality of their products.