Six Sigma In The New Era Of Quality Management

Starting from an in-house programme in Motorola in the late 1980's and subsequent take up by GE and many others in the 1990's, the Six Sigma approach has now become well established around the world. There is increasing professional and academic literature on its application, and the reported successes of both individual projects and corporate programmes remain highly impressive. Six Sigma is in many senses a divergence from more traditional recent quality management approaches. It is project-based in “fenced-off” areas, rather than “wall-to-wall” such as with Total Quality Management (TQM). It focuses on Customer Satisfaction and Quality Improvement, rather than Quality Assurance or Quality Control. With its more than 140 statistical tools and concepts, it on the one hand represents a return to the statistical basis of quality management such as represented by Deming, and on the other to a deployed strategic approach to quality management as associated, perhaps, with Juran and Feigenbaum. In this paper, we critically review the Six Sigma approach, its strengths and weaknesses, and explore it's relationship to the other Quality Management approaches, to ISO9001:2000 and to Lean thinking.