apologies for responding to the list, but this _requires_ some response. :)
1) Most of the promotion of 6-S can be found on the web site of the 6-Sigma Institute, in Phoenix, AZ, USA. Google will find that one - there are lots with sigma or 6-Sigma in the names.
2) The 'originator' was Mikel Harry, once with Motorola. It was there that he developed the package of the whole thing. Motorola won a Baldrige award one year, in large part on the strength of their improvmeent work.
3) When you dig into the details, you will find that the name comes from a curious application of binomial probability. when applied to continuous measures it comes out rather extreme, so a reason was found to reduce the 'true' sigma to 4.5. Long, detail type story, that doesn't interfere with t he reason it 'works.'
4) GE - Medical Systems was assigned/allowed to be first with implementation. I taught some of the sessions when they started to add some experience in the heavier projects. And yes, 6-Sigma worked for them. It saved them huge amount s of money. More ethan the accountants could account for.
5) If you have issues to deal with, like those of GE, then it will work for you, too. If you apply it as they did, esp. at the beginning. You still have to learn how to select a suitable technical question (project), devise paths to answers, and implement proposed solutions into reality.
Cheers,
Jay
Nigel Marriott wrote:
> As someone who is about to get involved in the whole industrial quality control, I have been reading up on a lot of material related to this area. Naturally 6-Sigma is one such area. On looking at the General Electric website (who seemed to have started the whole thing off), they stated that 6-Sigma is so called because there stated tolerance level of 3.4 defects or less million parts equates to 6 standard deviations under a normal distribution. Idly, I decided to verify this by looking up the one tailed probability of the normal distribution in EXCEL and STATISTICA. But I found that the stated probability level is in fact 4.5 standard deviations NOT 6 standard deviations!
>
> What have I done wrong?
>
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Jay Warner
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