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Six Sigma in the Contemporary Business Environment

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1 Introduction
The discerning customers nowadays are better educated and are able to recognize the quality of products or services, rather than just looking at the price. As competition between organizations grows more intense, many different factors and dimensions would be considered by the customers when they are going to measure the quality (Stevenson, 1999). In order to remain competitive among those rigorous competitions in the dynamic changing business environment, organizations have to maintain and enhance the quality of the products or services being delivered.

“Quality is consistent conformance to customers’ exceptions” (Slack, Chambers and Johnston, 2007). There is no definite definition for quality since it varies in …show more content…

To achieve this, we need a disciplined, data-driven approach for eliminating defects. The methodology focuses on the systematic processes with appropriate tools, training and measurements which guide to achieve Six Sigma through the steps of DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control (Weiner, 2004). The details of DMAIC will be discussed in the next section.

After understanding the basic concepts of Six Sigma, we can apply it to achieve two main goals:
 Define a target performance level of less than 3.4 DPMO for the process which is going to be improved
 As a mechanism for building a culture of excellence and deliver financial benefits to the organization

We can see that the second goal is a more long-term objective which requires much more planning and control, such as setting up teams to solve specific problems on a project-to-project basic, and training of employees so that the whole organization is searching for ways of listening and reacting to the customers, seeking facts to measure current success and focusing on the issue that really affect customer satisfaction (Berger, 2003). Therefore, Six Sigma is actually grown beyond its traditional usage of defect control now.

3 Six Sigma and other different methodologies
3.1 Changing focus from Y to X
Let’s look at the following equation. It can be used to describe the core methodology which Six Sigma is focus on:
Y = f(X)

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