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Six Sigma Training - Maximize Your Quality Standards

thumb it up Anna Woodward
Standards: all businesses have them; high standards are expected by your customers, and should be demanded by management and stakeholders; the highest standards are a necessity to achieve true excellence, and maintain your competitive edge in all aspects of business. Six Sigma, variously defined as a philosophy of continual improvement, a measure of variation or, most commonly, a process performance metric, is a methodology to reduce business process cost and waste, improve quality and delivery performance, and assure that client requirements are better understood and met by management and staff. No matter what an organization's function is, quality management is critical: not just the management of quality, but the quality of management. While a variety of Quality Management processes are available, none give you a more accurate statistical process performance metric than you will be able to generate using the methods provided by Six Sigma Training.

Clients desire perfection, but are knowledgeable enough to know that perfection, just as perpetual motion, is beyond human bounds. They will, therefore, be delighted with an aggressive evolution toward perfection: an asymptotic curve ever approaching that goal, in essence. With Six Sigma, that evolution can be tracked and demonstrated. Quality Improvement is not a static goal, but an ongoing process. Business success requires not simply meeting, but exceeding, the custom's expectations. Six Sigma Training teaches a process that allows you and your staff to maximize quality for your operation by utilizing a finely honed and quantifiable method, resulting in true Quality Improvement.

Savvy companies are familiar with the term "Six Sigma", but what does it really mean, and how can Six Sigma Training benefit your enterprise? Simply put, Six Sigma is about generating and analyzing statistics; statistics that affect your profitability, and the products or services provided to your clients. Without delving too heavily into the mathematics, Six Sigma represents the occurrence of 3.4 defects in one million opportunities. This ratio is generally considered as optimal, and with the proper investment of human resource time and capital, not only achievable, but essential to creativity, flexibility, success and growth.

In order to understand the importance of Six Sigma Training, a brief history of quality assurance standards is appropriate. Starting, for simplicity, with the First World War, slight variations in ordinance tolerations caused quality failures in weapons factories. Lack of standard calibrations often resulted in serious accidents. Initially, Quality Inspectors were placed to monitor the production process. While helpful, it was clear that there was more to do in the nature of quality. As time passed, Western countries developed Quality Program Requirements in order to try to conform supplier performance to user need. After various iterations, the expansion of quality ideology into industries beyond the military, the institution of the International Organization for Standardization, ("ISO"), and the now famous quality competition from Asia, Japan in particular, ISO 9000, and its offspring were developed.

Granted by Accredited Certification Bodies, after appropriate auditing of quality management, ISO 9001 compliance certificates may be achieved by business organizations. Business visionaries, however, know that, while reaching the high plateaus is essential, in order to both lead and succeed, the pinnacle is the only goal. Utilizing Six Sigma Training to gift your organization, and the personnel who have dedicated their careers to being leaders, with exceptional tools and skills, will allow you, and the clients whose trust makes it all possible, to climb the true path, and plant your flags on the summit.

Six Sigma Training is available to all levels of personnel involved in improving business processes, from anyone who can affect organizational change, to the highest senior management. Lean Enterprise Training is structured to provide an in-depth introduction to Lean Enterprise, (the reduction of waste and streamlining of operations), and demonstrate the correlation between Six Sigma and ISO 9000 standards. Executive Level Management Training serves to increase understanding of what Six Sigma is, and how high-level organizations that have properly instituted Six Sigma have achieved remarkable and demonstrable results. These results are discussed and analyzed in the context of Six Sigma "best practices" implementation.

Moving up the ladder, Six Sigma Champion Workshops focus on techniques and tools used by Sigma Improvement Teams, including the Black Belt Team disciplines applied to a project. Sigma Champions are responsible not only for sponsoring a project, but for determining which specific projects are optimally selected. Six Sigma Green Belt Training concentrates on teaching personnel to support high level, or Black Belt projects. Upon completion of Six Sigma Green Belt Training, a practitioner has the opportunity to participate in Six Sigma Black Belt Training, which inculcates the "DMAIC," (Define; Measure; Analyze; Improve and Control) model. Individuals are trained from project definition through process control. Participants achieve Six Sigma Black Belt certification by completing the three or four week course with 100% attendance; passing all weekly exams; receiving 8 hours of instructor coaching; successfully completing a project within four months of training completion; successfully defending that project, and passing a written final examination.

In sum, Six Sigma Training teaches your personnel to improve business processes, optimize performance, eliminate operational waste, and maximize profits, while saving your organization hundreds of thousands, and often millions of dollars,. It is the only system that truly statistically quantifies these results in a measurable and meaningful way.
About the Author:
This article published by the editorial staff of National Tollfree Directory. For more information about Six Sigma Training, Lean Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, visit SAI Global at http://www.xlp.com. Please direct any feedback on this article to editorial@strbusinessmedia.com.
 

 

No. of Times this article has been viewed : 612
Date Published : Feb 14 2008

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