Life Support’s senior management got up close and personal with Six Sigma during March. Thirty Life Support Executives and Managers attended Six Sigma Training held at the plant. As we’re getting acquainted with Six Sigma, a group of Operations and QA personnel are getting in-depth training in Lean Manufacturing techniques. What does it all mean?

Six Sigma is a statistical term that describes a very high level of quality, 3.4 defects per million, to be exact. As a business strategy, Six Sigma emphasizes reducing defects, reducing cycle time (or total throughput), and reducing costs. Companies that adopt Six Sigma establish an organizational structure with a repeatable methodology and a common set of improvement tools to accomplish business objectives.

A term that’s used along with Six Sigma is Knowledge Based Management. The idea is that statistical tools give feedback to management about processes. This feedback enables management to accurately assess problems and develop permanent solutions. By focusing on the cost of poor quality, internal failures, appraisal (measuring and auditing), waste, and prevention, Six Sigma tools help companies be better, faster, and lower cost producers of goods and services.

How does Life Support expect to roll out Six Sigma? Before the close of the second quarter (end of June), we hope to have a couple of Six Sigma/Lean projects underway. These projects will involve employees from across the organization and will be carefully selected to provide the best return possible.

We hope that early successes will promote greater employee acceptance of these initiatives and serve to diminish some of the natural cynicism for “flavor of the month” business programs.