Implementing Six Sigma

Manufacturing companies are prone to a number of errors in the manufacturing line. Machinery can get messed up and leave you with bad products or you can have employees that don't work hard and end up neglecting their role within the company. Since errors lead to waste, which leads to financial loss, customer uproar, and unhappy employees you need to focus on fixing the problems early. Implementing Six Sigma is one of the best ways to improve your company.

Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in the 1980s as a way to reduce or eliminate defects from the company. The goal of Six Sigma is to get your error rate down to 3.4 defects per million opportunities. This means that as you are producing products, you will have a very limited amount of defects to worry about.

When you implement Six Sigma, you will use your existing employees and managers to implement the process and to ensure it's involvement in the company to achieve the goal. Have you heard of the Six Sigma methods that include training courses where your managers are considered "black belts" and other things; you are seeing a portion of Six Sigma and what it can do.

How can you properly implement Six Sigma within your company and make it become successful? Here are some easy rules and tips to follow in order to ensure that your Six Sigma implementation will be a success:

Commitment - For Six Sigma to work you need to have everyone within the company committed to the process. Your managers will have greater involvement with Six Sigma but just about everyone will have some type of role with Six Sigma. Management especially needs to commit to the project and you must set the tone for the rest of the company in order to ensure that you are going to have the right outcome with your implementation. Having guidelines and rules in place will help your employees to see what they need to do. Hold training programs for the employees as well as this will help them to learn more about their involvement in Six Sigma and how it will help the company as well as themselves.

Define - Once you are focused on Six Sigma and making sure its right and the entire company is committed to it, you want to define the scope of your particular project. Set some goals for the Six Sigma process by talking to your customers. Use social media sites where you can get in touch with your customers so you can evaluate their needs. You can also get this information by sending out customer surveys.

Measure - The measure step of Six Sigma involves understanding what your defects are and if your current system and performance tools are working accurately. This phase can be a challenge if you don't define your existing systems correctly. Statistical data analysis can help you to track your results after you have implemented Six Sigma.

Analyze - Your next phase is to analyze the information you have collected from the measure phase. Analyzing will help you to find out what type of defects and problems are occurring within the manufacturing process so you can then come up with a way to make things run faster and without problems.

Improve - You need to make sure you have a solution for the problems. You want to do things better, at a faster rate, and for a lower amount in order to acquire the improvements you need for the company.

Control - The final phase of Six Sigma is to implement control over the various systems. You need to control your measuring tools and use the customer feedback in order to gain statistical information you need to make sure you have been able to solve future problems.