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 As a pioneer and inventor of Six Sigma practices, Motorola has been revolutionizing the working of businesses across the world for more than 20 years now. The result-oriented processes and methodologies in Six Sigma are designed to improve speed, efficiencies and sustainability of organizations, putting them in the pursuit of perfection by constantly raising the bar in terms of their, total, continuous improvement.
Mathematical background for Six Sigma
Sigma is a term derived from statistics, now used as a measure in manufacturing and also translated usefully to non-manufacturing realms.
Essentially, Sigma denotes the deviation of values from the mean of the population, where the word population describes a collection of objects that share certain general characteristics.
- We can speak of the population of registered voters, the population of domestically manufactured automobiles, and so on. We may also refer to the parts created by a given manufacturing process as a population.
- When individual items in a population are measured regarding specific characteristics, they often exhibit a similar pattern.
- Many items are seen to be at or close to a central value, but as we move further away from the central value, the number decreases. For example, if we considered a large party attended by a mixed group of adults, we would probably find that most people fall into the category of 5’2” to 5’10”. Lesser numbers of individuals would be in the categories 5’0” to 5”2” and 5”10” to 6’0”. Even fewer people, probably a very scant number, would be shorter than 5’0” or taller than 6’0”.
- This kind of pattern, where many items in a population cluster at or near a central value, with fewer and fewer items as one moves farther away from the central value, occurs so often, with so many different types of populations, that it is called the Normal Distribution. When a population exhibits this pattern, it is said to be normally distributed.
- Sigma thus stands for Standard Deviation, which measures how far away from the population mean values lie. It is specific for a given population and its values may change as the population varies.
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