Could you imagine a world with one hour of unsafe drinking water, 400 letters an hour never arriving at their destination, 500 incorrect surgical operations a week or 22,000 cheques deducted wrongly from bank accounts each hour - this would be a world of 99.9% defect-free. Do you really think this is acceptable?

When it affects your health or your pocket no-one doubts the need for zero defects, but zero defects should be something natural that we all should strive for in anything we do. The sheer fact of accepting a 5% error margin is totally unacceptable, except of course if the benefits produced by eliminating that 5% don't compensate the costs involved in eliminating that error.

This is what makes Six Sigma standout from other quality management systems, the close link to finance. The potential benefits and costs of process improvement projects are estimated and quantified which helps the business decide which project should get the go ahead. Once underway, the analyse phase of six sigma confirms the financial viability and then this is verified at the control phase.

To get Six Sigma up and running you'll need to follow the these six steps:

WHAT DO YOU DO? - Define your product and service.

WHO USES THE IT? - Identify your customer and what they consider to be really important. Like all quality management system we mustn't forget that the objective is customer satisfacción, not perfection.

WHAT DO YOU NEED? - Identify the needs so as to provide your product or service.

HOW DO YOU DO IT? - Now you must sit down and decide how to do it, establish the processes that will provide your product or service to the customer with the level of satisfaction identified.

HOW CAN YOU DO IT BETTER? - Analyse all processes to eliminate both mistakes and wasted effort.

HOW CAN YOU DO IT EVEN BETTER? - Ensure continuous improvement by following this procedure: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control. And as we said earlier, always bearing in mind how much ($) will the improvement provide.

Now, from here Six Sigma goes on to measure improvements through statistical information by identifying the deviations between the design characteristics and the actual charateristics of the product produced or service provided and much more... but although I did study quite a lot of mathematics, I must admit I have this quite rusty, so I will leave this more in-depth study for another article.

When would you accept less than zero defects?

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