Year: 2011
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Six Sigma is a customer focused continuous improvement strategy and discipline that minimizes defects.It is a philosophy to promote excellence in all business processes with aggressive target goals.Six Sigma is a five phase methodology for continuous improvement which uses a metric based on standard deviation.It is also a statistic which describes the amount of variation in a process.Six Sigma is focused on customer satisfaction and cost reduction by reducing variation in processes.At the core of the method, Six Sigma utilizes a discipline that strives to minimize defects and variation of critical variables towards an achievement of 3.4 defects per million opportunities in product design, production, and administrative processes.Customer satisfaction and cost reduction can be realized by reducing variation in processes that produce products and services which they use.While focused on reducing variation, the Six Sigma methodology uses a well-defined problem solving approach with the application of statistical tools.The methodology uses five phases including Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC).The purpose of the five phases are to define the problem, measure the process performance, analyze the process for root causes, improve the process by eliminating or reducing root causes, and control the improved process to hold the gains.The goals of Six Sigma include developing a world-class culture, developing leaders, and supporting long-range objectives.There are numerous benefits of Six Sigma including a stronger knowledge of products and processes, a reduction in defects, an increased customer satisfaction level that generates business growth and improves profitability, an increased communication and teamwork, and a common set of tools.Six Sigma is commonly credited to Bill Smith, an engineer at Motorola, who coined the term in 1984.The concept was originally developed as a safety margin of fifty percent in design for product performance specifications.This safety margin was equivalent to a Six Sigma level of capability.Since it's first introduction, Six Sigma has continued to evolve over time and has been adopted throughout the world as a standard business practice.In order to achieve Six Sigma, an organization must understand the customer's wants and needs, also known as the voice of the customer (VOC).The voice of the customer is defined as the identification, structuring, and prioritization of customer needs.Within the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology, gathering the voice of the customer falls within the define phase.This enables the team to fully understand the customer's expectations at the beginning of www.intechopen.comSix Sigma Projects and Personal Experiences 46 the project.Prior to initiating any project or process improvement initiative, the organization or team must determine how the customer defines quality.The customer is typically surveyed or interviewed (among other techniques) to determine their expectations and these are then analyzed using quality function deployment (QFD).A critical aspect of a QFD analysis is gathering the voice of the customer to assess how a product or service measures against what the customer wants or expects.Customers continually want more reliable, durable products and services in a timely manner.In order to remain competitive, all organizations must become more responsive to customers, strive for Six Sigma capability, and operate at world class level.Quality function deployment has been widely used to capture the voice of the customer and translate it into technical requirements in the development of products and services.It is a link between product or service development and technical specifications to achieve customer satisfaction.Applications of QFD range from product development, service development, and product re-projecting (Miguel & Carnevalli, 2008).QFD was developed by Yogi Akao in 1966 and was initially introduced in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s.QFD was first implemented in Mitsubishi's Kobe shipyard in 1972.Following QFD's introduction in Japan, it was then implemented primarily in manufacturing settings in the United States.Since then, it has been successfully used in many industries and various functional areas, including product development, quality management, customer needs analysis, product design, planning, engineering decision making, management, teamwork, timing, costing and other areas (Chan and Wu, 2002).Assessing customer requirements is a complex task.Traditional approaches have focused on present customer needs; however, Wu, Liao, and Wang ( 2005) have concluded that, since customer needs are dynamic and may vary drastically over time, analyzing future customer needs is critical to an organization's long-term competitiveness.Customer needs may vary depending on various factors, the most important and complex of which is human nature.Other factors may include cultural setting, work environment, age, sex, etc.The most common way to determine customer requirements is through direct customer interaction, but surveyors must consider what a customer means rather than what he or she says.Quality function deployment is a systematic process to integrate customer requirements into every aspect of the design and delivery of products and services.Understanding the customers wants or needs from a product or service is crucial to the successful design and development of new products and services.QFD is a system that utilizes customer demands to meet client missions by outlining what the customer wants in a service or product.QFD involves the construction of one or more matrices, called quality tables, which ensure customer satisfaction and improved quality services at every level of the service and product development process.QFD is a planning process that translates customer needs into appropriate company requirements at each stage, from research and product/service development to engineering, manufacturing, marketing/sales, and distribution.It is crucial for any organization to understand their customers' requirements and service expectations as they represent implicit performance standards used by the customers in the assessment of service and product quality.A significant relationship between the relative quality, as perceived by the customers, and the organization's profitability has been shown.www.intechopen.com
Source: InTech eBooks
DOI: 10.5772/16602
Authors: Elizabeth A., Cassandra C.
Institution: Missouri University of Science and Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W1525088094