It’s time for me to go back to work, and I’m finding a lot of the positions I am interested in require a certification in SigmaSix. Would someone please explain, simply, what it is, and why it’s so important?
Thank you in advance.
The successor to ISO9000, because everyone figured out how essentially meaningless that designation is. 
It means you and your company have learned to jump through a lot of tiny hoops, to prove to investors, partners, clients etc. that you can jump through tiny hoops really well.
The common term is Six Sigma. The ‘sigma’ relates to variance, which measures how much a set of elements differs from the average. If many elements differ significantly from the average, sigma is high. If every element equals the average, sigma is zero.
A while back, manufacturing companies wanted to improve their production so that, for every million units produced, only 3-4 units were defective. In statistical terms, this is referred to as six-sigma manufacturing.
Since then, business gurus have hijacked the term, and now ‘six sigma’ refers to a set of general guidelines for achieving quality. I can’t remember the specifics, but I’m sure someone can add to my summary.
I worked for a large truck leasing corporation and they attempt to apply it to the maintennce dept as well as other depts. I can see where it has improved outcomes but still comes no where near the low variances they are hoping for. A production machine producing parts can be improved on until it can hold very low tolerances. A human being is much harder to control that way.
seems like an awful lot of micro managing. But it’s what they’re looking for so I guess I’d better get certified.
Six Sigma doesn’t replace ISO 9001. They aren’t the same thing.
As HoneyBadger points out, Six Sigma is more appropriately applied to a process that repeats itself a very large number of times. Actual achievement of Six Sigma levels of quality requite a defect be made no more than once every 290,000 times a process is used, which in most businesses is a statistical impossibility, since they won’t do anything that many times; they would have to be either perfect, or can’t get there. But in a very large company producing many things - let’s say Hershey making chocolate bars - that’s a possible goal, even if it’s a stretch.
The unique and, frankly, sort of weird thing about the Six Sigma set of tools is the bizarre martial-arts-themed titles granted to people who get qualifications in it - Champions, Black Belts, that sort of thing. I honestly have no idea why that started and can’t think of an equivalent in other management systems or process improvement disciplines. Aside from that, there isn’t a lot about it that wasn’t being done before under a different name; it just applies some statistical rigor to the process.
In general, Six Sigma offers various statistical and mapping tools to deal with improving processes in order to make them more reliable and repeatable, in theory raising both efficiency and quality. The tools also help isolate which variable(s) affect the process outcomes (signal) and which don’t (noise). In contrast, “Lean” tools are designed to deal with the wasted time between processes, AKA white time or non value added time. They are similar, but not the same. You will often see them combined as “Lean Six Sigma”, so if you are going to look to be certified in one you may as well look into the other.
Certification is not (or should bot be) easy. At my company green belt certification requires 2 one week rounds of classroom training and leading a project (from defining a problem to implementing solutions) that generates a net 12 month save of at least $50,000. Black belt requires 2 more weeks of advanced classroom training and completing 2 complex, cross site/function projects that deliver a net 12 month save of $250k each. The black belt portion of the certification here takes anywhere from 12 months to 3 years.
I was unaware of the dollar amounts required. That raises a couple of questions for me:
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Doesn’t that make the size of the company for which you work hugely relevant to the ease of getting your belts? Saving a quarter million at GM, which has income and expenses in the billions with a B, is going to be a lot easier than at Joe’s tractor repair, which may not even have a quarter million in expenses most years. (Ok, probably nobody at Joe’s is getting their Six Sigma cert, but you see the point).
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So what if you don’t hit the target? You save $49,000 over 12 months, too bad, take it again? What if the organization is also so efficient that cutting expenses any more would be counter-productive? It seems like in a highly efficient workplace you’re screwed, which is the opposite of what it should be.
To expand upon that, ISO 9001 is a quality management system. It’s essential function is to establish that you have a quality management process, that the process is adequately documented and accessible to workers, and that sufficient records are maintained to assess how well the system is working or being used.
Six Sigma is a process improvement system. The original name is derived from the program established by Motorola in order to reduce fabrication errors in semiconductors to less than six standard deviations (sigmas). The process as applied at Motorola has been attributed with over ten billion dollars in savings since its introduction, and has gone on to be implemented at many other manufacturers with great success. It has gone on to be combined with a number of other tools for process improvement which are not strictly applicable to high volume manufacturing but provide a structured way to approach process improvement.
Both of these systems have earned ridicule not because they don’t bring intrinsic value when correctly applied, but because when ignorant executives implement it broadly across an organization with no plan or clue as to what kind of improvements they want to see, it is a costly waste of time for employees who are forced to go through the exercises by rote and then apply them to project that don’t need to be done, such as generating ISO 9001 documentation for inventorying the office supplies or running a Six Sigma program to create an automated business development reporting system (real examples that I’ve seen). Anyone who works in a manufacturing-type of field can recognize the value in standardization and organized process improvement, but when the only things being improved are some CEO’s ability to boast that everyone from the corporate counsel to the janitor is a Six Sigma black belt, you can be assured that virtually no one in the entire company is getting any value out of it.
As for getting independent training, you can probably find it but will be overpriced. And frankly, it isn’t a discriminator for most positions as most companies will want you trained in their Six Sigma processes. If you otherwise meet job requirements a hiring line manager will probably overlook that you don’t have a green belt or whatever, and just ensure that you’re part of the next training cycle.
Stranger
I worked at Volvo when they went through the ISO/SixSigma craze.
One part of the ISO certification was we all had to write instructions so someone else could step in and do our job.
The problem was the instructions were written on such a high level they worthless. One day I wrote the ultimate high level overview of my job (and every other job in the company)
- Come to work
- Coffee
- More work
- Lunch
- Back to work
- Go home
There you go high level ISO compliant work instructions.
Considerable blame must be put on consultants who sell companies a terrible bill of goods. Many of the ISO 9001 systems I’ve seen implemented by consultants constitute professional misconduct, but unfortunately there’s no professional body to punish a consultant.
Company managers, unfortunately, hire consultants because they don’t know how to do it themselves, and don’t find out until it’s too late. I have had this conversation more than once:
ME: Your quality manual is ten times longer than it needs to be and appears to be written in Martian. None of this makes any sense. It cannot possibly help you. It’s terrible.
EXECUTIVE: What?
ME: I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I think a lot of this was copied from another company I audited, and they don’t even do the same thing as you.
EXECUTIVE: We paid $25,000 for this!
ME: That’s very regrettable.
EXECUTIVE: So how do we fix this?
ME: I suggest burning it and starting over. That’s just between you and me, I’m not supposed to consult.
When it’s done right, though, I’ve seen companies literally pull themselves from the brink of insolvency and become successful.
At this point, unless they are a manufacturing company requiring certification in six sigma just shows they are clueless.
The biggest issue is measurement. In manufacturing you can make precise measurements on a number of process parameters. This is impossible in most other areas six sigma is applied, this is impossible. If you ask someone how they are going to measure and they tell you a survey, run. Surveys are inherently incapable of measuring anything to the level of precision required.
So it is not just CEOs being clueless, it is a subset of consultants who want to pretend they are as good at improvement as manufacturing people while not having to deal with actually proving it.
If a company offers to train you, do it, and read up about it, but don’t spend your own money.
And look up where Motorola semiconductor manufacturing is today.
In Bell Labs we had a thing called PQMI, six sigma for people who weren’t innumerate. I got trained by someone from the computer division. A few months later we got a computer from that division, designed using the principles. It was the biggest piece of crap we’d ever seen.
Having just gone through this process over the last three years at Boeing, I can attest that Amateur Barbarian’s answer is without question, the single most accurate answer in this thread.
The seemingly ‘glib’ response is actually dead accurate. It’s all about proving something, for basically nothing, to check a box, which most likely won’t have any relevant impact on what you’re having to do anyway in your business, but to get that all important check.
Either Six Sigma, or ISO 9001.
I’m being nice here.
Those savings targets are what we use at my company only, AFAIK there is no Six Sigma standard for certification. Some companies may require more, some may require classroom only. My point was that, at most companies, the certification is not taken lightly and requires a substantial effort to attain.
The currently popular saying at my company is “Handrails, not handcuffs”. The savings targets are guidlines, not a hard and fast line in the sand. In your example above, the candidate would earn their certification. The sole purpose of the targets is to make sure the project is of sufficient size that one can use the tools learned in green belt/black belt training. I also helps emphasize that green belt certification is tough, but black belt is 5 times tougher - here, at least.
If your organization is that efficient, you don’t NEED to train any more Six Sigma leaders.
It’s a packaged program to attempt to teach people how to use their common sense to create value. Manager’s who don’t know how to evaluate people, can use it as an objective way to know if their employees are smart enough to do more than complete their daily tasks.
I’ve done that! I’ve done that a lot and very well according to my supervisors.
so seeing it for a utility company is overkill?
Biggest mistake my former company made was hiring a team of consultants. It took them eight years to recover from that.
I like that advice
Then I’m golden. On a regular basis, I went above and beyond.
This has been very helpful. Thank you all
No, it’s not. It is, taken literally, absolutely wrong. I assure you I know more about this stuff than anyone else in the thread, and Six Sigma doesn’t replace ISO 9001 and couldn’t. They don’t do the same thing, aren’t the same thing, and one could not “replace” the other. His response is not dead accurate, it is, absolutely and without question, inaccurate.
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so seeing it for a utility company is overkill?
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I could see Six Sigma working in a large utility company in terms of the billing process. A large part of a utility company’s service to the customer is, after all, getting their bills there on time and correct; I’ve audited a number of utilities and not only is billing a source of error, but it’s probably the one that creates the most pissed off customers. Delivering the power itself is generally pretty smooth and outages are almost always out of the utility’s control anyway, but billing is a place you can screw up and enrage a customer. If you had a really large customer base, you’d be sending out millions of bills a year; you could certainly do some Six Sigma-level error reductions there.
I’ve never SEEN a utility try Six Sigma, probably in part because utilities are pretty heavily measured and regulated already. But in theory, it’s doable.
And one food fad is not like the other because one involves gluten and the other involves fat, which are just totally completely different things.
Sorry. In around 35 years I’ve seen so many of these pointless “prove your company is great by doing our 12 simple Jack LaLanne exercises” regimens that they all look alike. They’re company-improvement programs by people who have never been out of an accounting office and measure progress by the shelf-feet of documentation.
Come on. ISO wants to you to be able to repeat what you’re doing and have it documented. The process doesn’t have to be optimized but it does have to be repeatable and they’re looking for consistency.
SixSigma looks to take existing processes and optimize them. It presupposes that you have a documented repeatable process to optimize in the first place. Only a fool would try to slap a sixsigma approach onto an organization that flies by the seat of their pants.
That said, small batch outcomes or low information services (where you have to iterate to achieve a decent understanding of the issue at hand) are not great candidates for trying to control chart your way to fame and fortune.
sigh No, they aren’t. They may often be applied this way by executives and managers in a cargo cultish-attempt to somehow miraculously improve productivity, but that doesn’t mean they are without value or are “by people who have never been out of an accounting office and measure progress by the shelf-feet of documentation.”
RickJay is correct that it is factually inaccurate to equate ISO 9001 with any version of Six Sigma or other process improvement systems. Not only are they not the same species, they’re not even in the same phylum. ISO 9001 is a quality management system. It is intended to provide a framework to document existing processes. It is not intended to improve processes and in fact has virtually nothing to do with the details of the actual process (hence the complaints about instructions being documented at such a high level as to be worthless to anyone trying to follow them, but that is a flaw in the documentation, not the system). Six Sigma is a process improvement system; it is not intended to document processes but rather to identify metrics by which one can assess the effectiveness or efficiency of a process and use that to gain insight into how to improve it.
In fact, Six Sigma has been applied effectively by the very people working in production. That it is also applied in a wholly inappropriate fashion to functions with too much variability to control (i.e. processes that involve regular human judgement) by people who do not have adequate training to apply the methods correctly or consistently does not mean that it is intrinsically flawed. That people and corporations have pursued these certifications without focus or goal has diluted the perception of their value (and frankly, the value of their own jobs if they can squander so much time doing something with no positive result), but anyone who has used them in the appropriate context can appreciate the value that they can potentially bring to reduce the enormous amounts of wastage which are common in companies that have no formal quality documentation or process improvement programs.
I’ll offer an example of an unnamed company I currently deal with. The company–a fast growing start-up–had eschewed process documentation (the alleged “blizzard of paperwork”) and any kind of formal quality control because they claimed it would slow them down. As a barebones start-up with a bunch of young 'uns banging together parts in a warehouse, this was probably true; after all, the real goal (whether they realized it or not) wasn’t to be successful in their first attempts, but to have interesting failures that forced them to learn how to distinguish between good designs and bad designs.
Once they grew and started producing actual salable products, however, this almost utter lack of coherent documentation meant that any problem they had with their product (a large, complex, and highly fault-intolerant system) was almost impossible to pursue back to a root cause, so they continued to have the same problems over and over again, requiring a lot of extra labor, last minute repairs, and not a small amount of blind pig luck. Finally, they took (or by some accounts were forced) to take the advice of some of their customers and start adopting industry standard practices for documentation and quality control. While this required bringing in more people and doing more work up front, their problems reduced manyfold and upon launching their revised product line they were better able to control quality and resolve design and production problems more effectively.
They still have problems–with this kind of system, it is almost impossible not to–and they still struggle to figure out how to effectively implement their processes, which are in constant flux, but at least employees can now look in a central location and find a structured list of processes and procedures. Now they have records of who did what and when, so when the same error crops up over and over they can trace it back to a particular component or process step. They don’t have to constantly rediscover the same error over and over, and can implement a corrective action which actually corrects the fundamental problem rather than just constantly applying a band-aid solution.
And this could be said about almost any company that produces a complex system or high volume product. There are always improvements that can be made, either in fixing existing problems or reducing the cost or difficulty. This approach is exactly what led Japan from being regarded as a third rate manufacturer of crappy imitations of other countries’ products to having a reputation for producing the highest quality of complex consumer products (cars, electronics, construction and mining equipment) in the world. To suggest that it is all crap just because your personal experience in seeing them applied inappropriately in a series of McJobs says less about the systems than about your career.
Stranger