There’s No Magic About Six Sigma

Sigma is the Greek term for variation. A sigma measurement calculates how often (based on the average and standard deviation of a process) a work process will fail to meet a customer requirement. Such a failure is called a deficit in sigma parlance.

For example, if the new business process takes an average of 10 days to put a policy on the book with a standard deviation, the sigma calculation will predict how often you will be late in meeting the ultimate customer’s expectation or the producer’s expectation which may be related to commission payment.

There’s no magic about Six Sigma except that it translates into 3.4 deficits per million opportunities, which is generally far better than most companies perform.