Question: When is Six Sigma not Six Sigma?<br>Answer: When it's the Six Sigma Metric!!©
Arthur M. Schneiderman - June 13, 2000

Business Issue

Six Sigma (6s) Quality is a popular approach to process improvement, particularly among technology driven companies such as Allied Signal, General Electric, Kodak and Texas Instruments. Its objective is to reduce output variability through process improvement, and/or to increase customer specification limits through design for producability (Dfp), so that these specification limits lie at more than ¦ 'six' standard deviations, or s's, from the process mean (I'll explain the quotation marks later). In this way, defect levels should be below 3.4 'defects per million opportunities' for a defect, or 'dpmo' for short...