Effective Product Design
Introduction Organization success is dependent on customer satisfaction and delight. Customer satisfaction is achieved through development of product and service, which have all attributes required by the customer. A success product or services do not only have attractive package design but should be also able to provide robust performance. Thus, product design must be practical […]
Transitioning to Agile? What Project Managers Must Know About This Hot Methodology
How Agile Has Become the Talk of the Town and What it Means to Be Left Behind Walk into any business conference or eavesdrop on any discussion with managers and execs in the corporate world and the term, Agile, invariably pops up along with associated terms such as Kanban, Scrum, and DevOps. While these terms […]
Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective
The concept of insurance came about in the business field to cover the risk of loss of assets due to natural and manmade disasters as well as other calamities. In the current times, Organizations especially those which are dependant heavily on IT systems have begun to look at preventive steps as well as plan for […]
The Economics of Electronic Healthcare Records
Administrative costs form a major portion of the cost structure of any health care provider. In the case of the United States, administrative costs account for more than 20% of the total costs which need to be incurred in order to serve patients. It is for this reason that many healthcare organizations are trying to […]
Six Sigma – Introduction to Measure Phase
The mention of the Measure phase of the Six Sigma module brings into mind pictures of statisticians performing complex operations on data to derive meaning out of it. While this is true to some extent, the complexity of the process is highly over-rated. True, that there is a tremendous amount of statistics involved. However, in […]
Sigma or standard deviation is a statistical measure of dispersion in data. It is a measure which uses the characteristic of past data to make judgements about how the process will perform in the future. If a given set of data has normal probability distribution then the number of defects that will occur in the process over a period of time can be known depending upon the sigma level of the process.
The sigma (standard deviation) is multiplied with the numbers 1, 2, 3 etc to come up with a range. For example lets assume that the average of a data set is 10, while the sigma is 2. Hence 1 sigma will include all the data points between 10 +/-2 i.e. between 8 and 12. A 2 sigma measure would include 10+/-2(2) i.e. all data points between 6 and 14. So on and so forth.
However, it is a known fact that in a normal distribution the points tend to be around the mean. Therefore all the points will be closer to the average. Hence as one goes to farther and farther sigma levels the additional gains in terms of productivity are less.
To be a six sigma organization, the processes of an organization must be able to support this kind of efficiency sustainably. Building such robust processes requires a lot of intelligence and effort.
| Sigma Level | Defects/Million | Percentage Defects |
| 1 | 691462 | 69% |
| 2 | 308538 | 31% |
| 3 | 66807 | 6.7% |
| 4 | 6210 | 0.62% |
| 5 | 233 | 0.023% |
| 6 | 3.4 | 0.00034% |
| 7 | 0.019 | 0.0000019% |
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The Cost of Poorly Performing Processes – Need for Six Sigma
February 12, 2025
