September in South San Francisco at Six Sigma Training

Six Sigma Training? What's Six Sigma? Yeah, that's what I thought until today.

I arrived at the Residence Inn last night at 8:00. It's not so bad. I'm in a "Studio". Here's the kitchen... A refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, pantry and bar. OK, maybe I can handle this.

There's a nice little sitting area with a fireplace. Nice artwork...

I can sit at the desk, enjoy the fire and watch Monday Night Football... I could get used to this.

Here's the view out the window (Ok, it's the window by the elevator, not the window in my room) -

Look at this office building. These workers can go out their office back door, and stroll along the walking path next to the San Francisco Bay. What a life...

So what's Six Sigma anyway? I'm glad you asked. In today's class, Jeff taught us that Six Sigma is a process improvement business strategy that began at Motorola. It has changed quite a bit since it was first used at Motorola.

If you really want to know what Six Sigma is, read what Wikipedia says...

"Sigma (the lower-case Greek letter σ) is used to represent the standard deviation (a measure of variation) of a statistical population. The term "six sigma process" comes from the notion that if one has six standard deviations between the mean of a process and the nearest specification limit, there will be practically no items that fail to meet the specifications.

Taking the 1.5 sigma shift into account, short-term sigma levels correspond to the following long-term DPMO (Defective Parts per Million Opportunities) values (one-sided):
One Sigma = 690,000 DPMO = 31% efficiency
Two Sigma = 308,000 DPMO = 69.2% efficiency
Three Sigma = 66,800 DPMO = 93.32% efficiency
Four Sigma = 6,210 DPMO = 99.379% efficiency
Five Sigma = 230 DPMO = 99.977% efficiency
Six Sigma = 3.4 DPMO = 99.9997% efficiency"

'What?' Yeah, that's what I said. Jeff didn't explain it that way (and I think you can see why). He actually did a great job teaching us how we can use Six Sigma at our businesses to improve our processes, be more efficient, save money, and make our customers more satisfied. Now that's what I'm talk'in about!