Six Sigma

The Six Sigma approach has been used with great success in leading companies
such as GE, Johnson & Johnson, Allied Signal, and Quest Diagnostics. It was first begun
at Motorola, but received international acclaim when Jack Welch at GE began
touting it as the approach that would save his company billions of dollars. It
has...and the rest is history.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a statistical measure of process capability that lets you measure the
quality of your business’ products and services. A level of Six Sigma (about 3 defects per every
million) represents the highest quality:virtually all products and business processes are
defect-free. But most companies today function at only 3 to 4 sigma and lose 10-
15% of their total revenue due to defects. Four sigma still means 6,210 defects per
million opportunities!

What does that mean? If your goal was 99% quality, you'd still have:

 One hour of unsafe drinking water per month

 Two unsafe plane landings per day at O'Hare International Airport, Chicago
 16,000 pieces of lost mail every hour
 500 incorrect surgical operations per week

Six Sigma was originally "named" at Motorola by a manager working to improve their
manufacturing processes. When Jack Welch began using it at GE, he made sure that it was
applied to the entire company - services as well as manufacturing