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How Good Should Your Products Be?

Six Sigma projects can be very profitable to the organization... when they’re properly selected.

H. James Harrington
Tue, 03/02/2010 - 07:45
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With the onset of Six Sigma methodology, many organizations have spent large sums of money to make all of their products and processes as close to six sigma as they can. I agree that the higher the level of sigma value, the better the quality of the output is if it’s not screened. But is that the best point in the operating curve for the organization?

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We all agree that variation is good for the makeup of a team, but it can be disastrous from a quality standpoint in the products we are delivering. Six Sigma, as the name implies, was designed to decrease variation in outputs, thereby increasing the probability of shipping error-free products (see figure 1).

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Comments

Submitted by JAE on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 18:52

Sigma capability - How good should your products be?

This seems to be over-simplified, from the medical device manufacturing perspective. If you accept making more defects, you at least need to understand the strain this will put on your detection system and have bullet-proof measurement systems analysis for it. You can not assume all defects are routinely caught; the more of them your process produces, the greater the risk may be for them not to be contained. If that defect can cause a serious device failure, you may not be able to accept lower sigma performance based strictly on a cost analysis.

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Submitted by Nebula on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 14:28

Too simple

This article would be good if it only considered manufacturing quality, and the consumer risk was low and the perfection of inspection was high. There is a big difference between, "This light bulb doesn't light up," and, "Our aircraft is falling out of the sky." This type of economic thinking gave us the trucks with the exploding gas tanks because it would cost more to have an improved design than the projected cost of the legal costs from the families. Too many people in management downplay the real cost of failures. If you improve products to a new level, you can gain more business. True, you can try to substitute inspection for competance, but how good does your inspection have to be to compensate for your process limitations?

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Submitted by Dave Gentile on Thu, 03/04/2010 - 14:00

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Good perspectives from Nebula and JAE - the organization needs to ask the right questions based on its value and missions. I generally believe in chasing perfection, but perfection needs to be carefully identified, along with attendant costs and resources, up front. Yes, I know I'm preaching to the choir.

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