Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a proven approach focusing on reduction of defects and increasing product or service efficiency. Most companies use some form of quality control to accomplish this task.

Quality control does several things for a business. It creates a better product or service for the company to market. By having better quality companies are able to better manage their resources and compete in the market place. Quality control also helps to better manage items like waste or employee hours.

Here are 6 Ways to approach increasing quality in an organization:
1. Facilitate a more rapid progression towards quality through the use of repetition to build the behavioral and management skills your managers and allow them to more readily develop those skills.

2. Reduce management and supervisor frustration by developing a positive, results-oriented attitude within each manager, thereby creating a more positive and motivating organizational environment.

3. Develop overall management and leadership skills such as open and honest communication, delegation skills, coaching, planning, problem solving, time management, leadership and motivation.

4. Provide a system of goal setting and action planning with managers so as to permit the achievement of management's objectives in conjunction with the Quality Management System.

5. Crystallize and communicate organizational objectives while monitoring progress and providing a systematic approach to effective time management toward reaching these goals and objectives. This will raise the level of each manager's success and reducing frustration.

6. Integrate the goals of the organization with the personal goals of the managers, thus creating an environment of motivation and mutual commitment.

As you can see there are many areas quality control can help in any business. There are many forms of quality control and many programs all ready setup to provide businesses resources in order to proceed with implementing some form of quality control such as Six Sigma, ISO 9000, ISO 9001 and ISO 2000 and these are just a few. Some companies create their own form of quality control. But each and everyone relies on statistics to carry out these programs.

Six Sigma is an overall enterprise improvement methodology that uses data to monitor, control, and improve operational performance by eliminating and preventing 'defects' in products and associated processes.
Six Sigma emphasizes producing better, faster, and lower cost product and services than the competition and stresses breakthrough improvement, for improved bottom line results. Six Sigma is also a process used to translate customer needs into a set of optimal tasks that are brought into harmony with one another.

By examining the optimal process, Six Sigma can have a powerful effect on the quality of products, the performance of customer services and the professional development of employees. The most important quality-improvement techniques stress employee motivation, change in corporate culture and employee education. Organizations known for product and service quality strongly believe that employees are the key to that quality.

In doing the quality control many aspects of statistics that we learned such as mean, average, expectation, variance and standard deviation would be used in order to carry out this process. Also many places use graphs in order to better visually represent the data. No quality control program could exist without statistics.