Quality at Its Best

No doubt you have heard of either Total Quality Management (TQM) or Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI). But have you heard of Six Sigma? If you’ve read anything by or about Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, who used the method to improve GE’s business model, then you probably have.

Six Sigma is a process-enhancement program that uses facts and data to develop better solutions. It is a quality improvement program that changes how organizations operate. Six Sigma shares some of the fundamental principles and tools of TQM and CQI, such as the study of processes and statistics, but the similarities stop there. Six Sigma is a smarter way to manage a business because it brings both the customer and the employee into the process, stimulating breakthrough results in every area of an organization. While TQM and CQI focus on detecting and correcting problems (also known as defects), Six Sigma provides specific methods to recreate a process itself, so that defects in it are never produced in the first place. Six Sigma focuses primarily on improving customer satisfaction, reducing waste, decreasing the time it takes to complete a task (cycle time), and producing significant cost savings by utilizing valuable employee input.

What is Six Sigma?

Originated by Motorola in the late 1980s after working with Japanese business models, Six Sigma’s use and popularity were turbocharged in 1996 when Jack Welch implemented it at GE with phenomenal results.

What exactly is Six Sigma? The word “Sigma” is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The main idea behind Six Sigma is: If you can measure how many “defects” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to zero defects as possible.

To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. An opportunity is defined as a chance to not meet expectations or a required specification. A One Sigma equals 690,000 defects per million opportunities. Obviously, achieving Six Sigma quality means you’ve created a nearly perfect process. It is certainly a difficult goal, but it’s one that is transforming organizations throughout the business world.

Six Sigma has produced significant results in companies such as GE, Motorola, American Express, 3M and Johnson & Johnson. These companies have saved billions of dollars, improved customer satisfaction and raised employee morale.

A Practical Example

An emergency department in a New York hospital was fast becoming the main source of medical care for many people. As a result, it struggled with the increased volumes of patients, excessive wait times and rising healthcare costs. By collecting, measuring and analyzing data, an in-house Six Sigma project team found that the average cycle time for treat-and-release walk-in ED patients was more than three hours. The team went to work breaking down the patient visit process from arrival to discharge. They studied the triage component, as well as registration and time spent with the physician. The team discovered major delays in treating patients were due to wide deviations in the manner in which the registration staff processed charts. The physician on duty was also a source of variation in the process. The team then utilized Six Sigma tools and improved the patient flow process, resulting in a decrease in wait time by 37% from 187 minutes to 118 minutes.

At the beginning of the project everyone involved said the ED was understaffed. The team also believed the ED was understaffed, but knew they had to trust the Six Sigma program and not react from gut instinct. Much to the team’s surprise, the data revealed the problem was not a staffing issue, but a process issue. Once the appropriate changes were made to the process, employees were not only attending to more patients, but were enjoying their work more. Staff members claimed that the tension was removed from the work environment. Employee absenteeism also decreased. Patients had shorter, more pleasant visits while in the ED. This was all accomplished without adding any more personnel.