SIX SIGMA: THE ADVANTAGE
I. INTRODUCTION
In a capitalist market, businesses are always competing against each other to gain more market share and profits. Obtaining the competitive edge in the market place is the aspiration for great companies and extremely necessary for the company's survival. In most companies, upper management usually creates a strategy, such as a low cost strategy or a differentiation strategy, to maximize its profit in the market place. Through the implementation of these different strategies, various methods of quality control have been developed. Six Sigma is the newest of these quality control mechanisms.
Six Sigma's main objective is to develop a "measurement-based strategy that focuses on process improvement and variation reduction" (Antony, 2004: 2) in producing a product or service. In fact, when using Six Sigma, the target goal for high quality is near 100% perfection. To understand Six Sigma, it is important to know what it is, the keys of implementation, and the advantages it brings to the company.
II. WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?
Tadikamalla (1994) describes Six Sigma as a quality program based on using normal distribution and statistics to emphasize the measuring of product defects, product yield, reliability, and inventory schedule. He states that "six-sigma is a quality improvement program with a goal to reduce the number of defects to as low as 3.4 parts per million" (83). The term "Six Sigma" uses the Greek letter Sigma which represents the standard deviation in statistics (Kihn, 2005). Six Sigma was originally developed by Motorola in the 1980s and has since been implemented by many companies to obtain operational success.
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