Six Sigma Concepts (DMAIC) and Cost of Quality

Six Sigma concepts and Cost of Quality



Earlier balancing quality levels with the cost were considered to be essential for financial survival. But now it is discovered that with six sigma concepts and advance lean you can achieve world class quality without paying much. It in fact costs less. The rationale for this is somewhat called cost-of-quality. Cost-of-quality is actually the cost of paying for things like rework, scrap and customer’s claims. Statistical facts shows that quality control in initial phases of business process pays very high returns in the overall cost reduction.



DMAIC road map in Six sigma.



Six Sigma Business process improvement process is defined by DMAIC roadmap.

DMAIC roadmap includes all necessary quality control steps



1. Define



The first step of six sigma process is Define.

In this step clients’ requirements and assets are defined.

In six sigma concepts, define step is very important.



2. Measurement



Six Sigma quality means attaining a standard of maintaining lesser than 3.4 errors or mistakes per million opportunities to make a error.



This includes all components of value chain i.e design, manufacturing, selling, management, service etc.



After the quality improvement project has been defined and bounded, the foremost element in the process of six sigma quality improvement is the measurement of performance. Effective measurement takes a statistical view of all supply chain processes and all the related problems. This dependence on statistics and logic is vital to the pursuit of 6-sigma quality. After this the next step is, knowing what to evaluate. The determination of sigma level is basically based on counting errors/defects, so we must measure the accurate frequency of errors/defects. Defects in a manufacturing procedure tend to be reasonably easy to define-simply a failure to meet a desired specification. To widen the application to other business processes and to further develop manufacturing, a new definition is useful: an error is any failure to meet a customer satisfaction requirement, and the customer is at all times the next person in the procedure.

In this opening phase, you would choose the critical-to-quality characteristics you think to improve. These would be based on an examination of your client’s requirements. Quality Function Deployment tool can be useful in this case. After you define your performance benchmarks and authenticate your measurement system, you will then be able to decide short-term and long-term process capability and actual business process performance.



3 Analyses



For identifying the root cause of the problem Statistical modeling and Data analysis is performed in analysis step.



4 Improve.



Improvement phase involves selection for potential causes of deviation and identifying correlations among them. The tool normally used in improvement phase is Design of Experiment.



5. Control



In this phase we control and regulate the process, we carry on the improvement.



As this is the last step of the six sigma business process improvement we do project documentation of the whole process.





Lean and Business process improvement.



Lean, kaizen, Just in time, Total quality management concepts has become essentials in every business process. Lean manufacturing and total quality management is must for economic survival and to gain any supply chain or operations expertise.

Lean and six sigma are finding their applications in all major sectors apart from manufacturing such as banking, retail, infrastructure, services, IT etc.



Six sigma certifications



Many professionals are going for six sigma certifications for gaining expertise in six sigma and lean sector. Two Certifications involved are Six sigma black belt and Six sigma green belt. To well verse with six sigma concepts people go for these certifications.