Six Sigma – A New Direction to Quality and Productivity Management

The fast changing economic conditions such as global competition, declining profit margin, customer demand for high quality product, product variety and reduced lead– time etc. had a major impact on manufacturing industries. To respond to these needs various industrial engineering and quality management strategies such as ISO 9000, Total Quality Management, Kaizen, Just–in–time manufacturing, Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Process Reengineering, Lean management etc. have been developed. A new paradigm in this area of manufacturing strategies is Six Sigma. The Six Sigma approach has been increasingly adopted world wide in the manufacturing sector in order to enhance productivity and quality performance and to make the process robust to quality variations. This paper discusses the quality and productivity improvement in a manufacturing enterprise through a case study. The paper deals with an application of Six Sigma DMAIC(Define–Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) methodo -logy in an industry which provides a framework to identify, quantify and eliminate sources of variation in an operational process in question, to optimize the operation variables, improve and sustain performance viz. process yield with wellexecuted control plans. Six Sigma improves the process performance (process yield) of the critical operational process, leading to better utilization of resources, decreases variations & maintains consistent quality of the process output. Index Terms – DMAIC, Process yield, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management.