As an entrepreneur, you will be particular about improving the manufacturing quality in your organization. You can achieve it by spotting and getting rid of the factors that contribute to defects in the production. This is what Six Sigma principles claim to help organizations achieve. Naturally, you will be interested in knowing what are Six Sigma principles so that you can implement them in your manufacturing unit to improve manufacturing quality. Let us start by understanding what is Six Sigma.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is nothing but a set of tools and techniques that claims to achieve process improvement. The American Engineer Bill Smith launched this technique in 1999 when he was working for Motorola. This concept aims at making sure that 99.99966% of all chances for the production of some features of a part are free of defects statistically.

The term Six Sigma is known to have its origin in the statistical modeling of production processes. The maturity of the production process is explained by a Sigma rating that denotes its outcome or the level of products free of defects that it creates.

What Does it Claim?

Now, before knowing what are Six Sigma Principles, you know what is Six Sigma all about. The strategies that this concept uses seeks to improve the quality of the product by spotting and getting rid of the causes of defects. Even, it claims to reduce variability in the business and production processes. This concept helps to achieve these things with the help of statistical and empirical quality management methods. Even, it seeks to achieve it by hiring people with expertise in Six Sigma. Every Six Sigma project follows a pre-defined technique and will have particular value targets. The targets can be anything like increasing customer satisfaction, bringing down pollution, etc. 

Key Principles of Six Sigma:

With an understanding of the concept of Six Sigma, you can put its principles into practice only when you are aware of what are Six Sigma principles. Accordingly, here are the common Six Sigma principles you should be aware of:

1. Focus on Customers:

The foremost goal of the Six Sigma Principles is to help businesses achieve customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers can turn out to be loyal customers in the long run. It will be possible to gain the complete satisfaction of customers only when they are provided with the utmost benefits. It will be possible to provide complete benefits to the customers only when their requirements are understood from the right perspective. It also involves understanding the drivers of sales and establishing quality standards based on customer demands and market trends.

2. Use Data:

Six Sigma principles also recommend the use of data for identifying variations in the process. When talking about variations in the processes, they can be of two kinds. They are natural variations and special-cause variations. Here, natural variations denote random variations that come across in the process, while special-cause variation involves the variations that arise due to external factors. Six Sigma principles claim to bring down special cause variations. 

Also, the principles recommend that understanding the process is crucial to finding the root cause of the variation. Here, process understanding should happen more extensively and deeply. Unless a proper study is done, it is not possible to gain extensive knowledge about the processes. To conduct a proper study, the presence of detailed data about the process is crucial as well. Here comes the question of how to collect detailed data. Let us find the answer here:

You can start your data collection with ease when you clearly define the goals of data collection in the first instance. Here are some details on how to define the data collection clearly:
 

• The first step in the data collection process is to identify the right data

• Then, you  will have to define the purpose of data collection

• Thirdly, you will have to define the expected insight
   

Next, you will have to explain the method you are going to follow for data collection

Then, you will have to get rid of the errors in the data collection 

Finally, you will have to define your data collection plan

In Six Sigma principles, the collection of data encompasses interviewing people, asking questions and making observations.

Once you have completed the data collection, you should check whether the data collected gives you the required knowledge for meeting the objectives that were set up. If you find that the data is not sufficient, you will have to collect data again to gather more information. You should repeat the data collection process until you identify the root cause for the variation in the process. Also, you should try to eliminate the cause with the help of the data collected. After you identify the considerable root cause that contributes to the variation, you can use statistical analysis.

3. Six Sigma DMAIC:

When you are finding the answer to the question of what are Six Sigma principles, you should know about the Six Sigma DMAIC approach. This approach is used typically for improving an existing process. Each letter in this approach is explained below:
 

• D denotes defining the issue and expected results

• M involves measuring the competency of the process

• A stands for analyzing the data and identifying the base cause of variations

• I is for improving or modifying the process such that the incidence of variations is reduced.

• C stands for controlling the process. It involves preventing and rectifying variations such that they do not result in defects.
   

4. Make Your Processes Flow Smoothly:

The good thing about Six Sigma is that everything here is process-driven. In other words, you cannot just leave things to ability or chance. The process must be not only functional but also smooth. Here, figuring out the issues is the first step to making sure that processes will happen smoothly. For instance, one of the common problems experienced by most teams engaged in a process is that one area of the process performs slower as compared to the rest of the process. When this happens, the speed at which the process happens will slow down. 

One of the core components of Six Sigma is that everything is process-driven. These bottlenecks can be the clearest type of failure for achieving the smooth flow of the process. In case, you have employed a technique like process mining, the probability of you using software will be more. This type of program will point out most bottlenecks at the time of analysis. 

5. Map Out the Value Stream:

Before you take steps to improve your process, it is better to be aware of all the steps in it. Even, if you have documented your workflows earlier, it is crucial to evaluate how are things done for identifying the steps that can add value. Also, it will help with identifying steps that do not add value so that they can be removed from the process.

Before you move with making any improvement, you should do one thing. You should have a look at the present state of your process. If you follow Lean-Agile principles in your organization, they can turn more effective only when you identify your value stream. This is how organizations foresee all the steps in a given process and identify the areas of waste. Building a value stream map is one way to do this. This  map is nothing but a flowchart that explains and evaluate the steps in a service or production process. 

Let us consider that you are identifying your value stream for building a car. In this case, your value stream map would encompass shopping of parts, distribution of the finished product and assembling the parts with quality assurance checked then and there. It is better to make sure that you get a big picture view of your process right from the beginning to the end. When you do this, you will not risk paying attention too much to a single domain.

6. Improve Collaboration within the Team:

One of the crucial principles of Six Sigma is not only the improvement of processes but also the improvement of how the team communicates with each other in the project for the production of the best services and products. In general, the most junior member of the team will get to see the issue first. He will be in a position to see what is happening with the product. For providing motivation and for improving the communication quality among the team members, you should ask the members of the team to report quickly in case they get to see deviations in the service or product line.  In turn, it will aid with the mitigation of the trouble and failure of the product. For effective collaboration between team members, Six Sigma Principles recommend giving titles to each member like process champion, process owner, etc. 

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Conclusion:

Six Sigma Principles aim at improving customer satisfaction, bringing down cycle time, eliminating defects, bringing down errors and improving quality. When all these things are achieved, overall your organizational performance will improve undoubtedly.