Six Sigma—Strategy for Organizational Excellence

Today’s business environment expects speed, flexibility, adaptability, accuracy, ease of doing business, with product and service performance as a minimum requirement. To meet this new set of business needs, organizations need to deploy tools, which can enable them to remain competitive and grow in the increasing digital age. Six Sigma is one of the strategies and tools which leading organizations have started using to achieve accuracy and speed and at the same time reduce cost and increase customer satisfaction and profits. Sigma is a Greek alphabet character and the sigma value indicates how often defects are likely to occur. Six Sigma’s target is to achieve less than 3.4 defects or errors per million opportunities, hence the name. According to Michael Hammer, at least 25% of the Fortune 200 companies claim to have a serious Six Sigma program. Six Sigma has been deployed strategically to change the culture of organization through inculcating process control discipline applied in manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses. The issue is no longer whether Six Sigma should be considered or not, but a question of when and how, since an organization cannot do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow.