A few days ago I was discussing Lean Six Sigma with a colleague. The question came up, ”what is six sigma?”
The term sigma (Greek letter σ) comes from statistics. It refers to the number of standard deviations from the mean (center) of the data.
One standard deviation (1 sigma) in either direction of the mean accounts for 68 percent of the good (error/defect free) data in the group. Three sigma account for 99 percent of the data. Six sigma accounts for 99.99966 percent of the data. If one looks at this another way, there can be 32 errors out of 100 for a 1 sigma process while a six sigma process will only have 3.4 errors out of 1,000,000.
While most processes do not necessarily require an accuracy level of six sigma, here are a few examples from insurance industry blogger Kevin M. Quinley of what could happen if the process used is only 99.9% effective:
- Hospitals would give twelve newborns to the wrong parents daily.
- Footwear companies would ship out 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes each year.
- The U.S. Postal Service would mishandle 18,322 pieces of mail every hour.
- The IRS would lose two million documents this year.
- Publishers would ship 2.5 million books with the wrong covers.
- Two planes landing at Chicago O’Hare would be unsafe every day.
- 315 entries in Webster’s Dictionary would be misspelled.
- Doctors would write 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions this year.
- 880,000 credit cards in circulation would have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.
- 103,260 income tax returns would be processed incorrectly during the year.
- 5 million cases of soft drinks produced would be flat.
- 291 pacemaker operations would be performed incorrectly.
- 3,056 copies of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will be missing one of its sections.
While most of these examples are not life threatening, a few are. A continuous improvement team, with input from the business, must decide what an acceptable error/defect rate is, as compared to the overall costs. This is one reason that I always carry my luggage on an airplane instead of checking my bag. Planes crash (i.e., errors) much less frequently than luggage is lost.
How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive workplace.
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