What is six sigma?

What is Six Sigma?

Sigma is the 18th letter of the Greek Alphabet. In statistics, it refers to six standard deviations. Mathematically, it is the rate taken to be 3.4 per million. In manufacturing, many believed it was impossible to achieve such a high process reliability, and therefore considered three sigma, or 67,000 defects per million acceptable. This was not acceptable to the Motorola.

Six Sigma is a quality management program whose purpose is to reach the quality of the "six sigma" levels. Bob Galvin succeeded his father Paul Galvin, the founder of, and head of Motorola. In the mid-1980s, Bob Galvin pioneered the Six Sigma philosophy. Since that time it has spread to several top manufacturing companies, such as The Dupont, Bank of America, GE, Honeywell, and Microsoft, to name a few. The Six Sigma philosophy is practical in any environment that the desire to control variation is needed. Proof of this occurred in the 2000, when Fort Wayne, Indiana implemented the program in city government, becoming the first city to do so.

Six Sigma performing Corporations business success:

Motorola: Saved $2.2 billion in four years.

Bank of America:
1. Saved hundreds of millions of dollars in 3 years of starting the Six Sigma program
2. Cut cycle times in half
3. Nearly eliminated all processing errors.

Dupont: Added $1 billion to its bottom line within the first two years, this increased
to $2.4 billion within four years.

General Electric: Within five years, profited between $7 and $10 billion dollars.

Honeywell: Saved more than $2 billion dollars in direct cost.

So, just what is this philosophy? It is the strive to deliver products and services to the customer with the greatest amount of speed, quality, and customer satisfaction. In doing so, the company will lower operation cost, achieve, and maintain higher shareholder returns as well as being valued as excellent among businesses and governmental enterprises.

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