Cambridge Business Association
What Is Six Sigma?
Book

What Is Six Sigma?

Larry Holpp and Pete Pande
McGraw-Hill, 2002
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

At last! A short, easy-to-read and effortlessly understandable explanation of Six Sigma. In keeping with the brevity and conciseness of this book, we’ll keep this review short: If you want to know what Six Sigma is, what it can accomplish, why it matters to you and how to implement a program of your own, getAbstract strongly recommends that you start with this book.

Summary

What Is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a way to better manage your business or department by putting the customer first and using facts and data to achieve better solutions. Six Sigma improves customer satisfaction, compresses cycle times and reduces defects. The goal is complete perfection in these areas 99.9997% of the time, based on the normal bell curve.

In order to achieve this high level of performance, you commit yourself and your company to a philosophy of excellence. You must focus on your customer and process improvement, and you must look to facts rather than intuition or gut feelings. The ultimate goal is to make every area of your organization better able to meet the changing needs of your customers, while adapting to shifting markets and technologies.

Total Quality Management (TQM) was a popular improvement-focused program in the 1980s that has died out in many companies. Six Sigma is different. It is customer focused, produces major returns on investments and changes how management operates.

It doesn’t just create improvement projects, it requires senior executives and leaders to learn new approaches to thinking, planning and executing. It involves...

About the Authors

Peter S. Pande is president of Pivotal Resources, Inc., a leading organizational improvement consulting and training firm. He has helped to guide Six Sigma initiatives at major corporations and is the co-author of the bestselling, The Six Sigma Way, plus, The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook. Larry Holpp is a consultant with Pivotal Resources and an author of books on teams and quality.

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