Understanding variation and how it compromises your organization's ability to consistently deliver value to customers is the cornerstone of the Six Sigma quality approach. IPM works with your team to develop repeatable and reliable processes using  statistical tools  to eliminate the root causes of defects and variation in your products and services.  This data intensive  methodology begins with an understanding of your customers' most important requirements (CTQs) and ends with an improved process that is well understood, documented and controlled to ensure that  requirements are consistently met or exceeded.

An effective Six Sigma program creates a highly detailed data picture which allows for easy identification of the most subtle defects.  It requires meticulous as-is mapping which is the first step in truly optimizing a process. This detailed mapping exercise along with project scoping, goal development and team creation are prerequisite for success at each of the five phases of Six Sigma process improvement:

Define the Customer, their Critical to Quality (CTQ) issues, and the Core Business Process involved.

Measure the performance of the Core Business Process involved.

Analyze the data collected and process map to determine root causes of defects and opportunities for improvement.

Improve the target process by designing creative solutions to fix and prevent problems.

Control the improvements to keep the process on the new course.   

Six Sigma's objective is to remove all process variation with no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities (or virtually no defects).  Lean, on the other hand, broadly maps value and nonvalue-adding process steps to identify waste and has the more modest objective of improving process performance, but not necessarily optimizing it.

Lean identifies "low hanging fruit" and improvements which can be implemented quickly and at relatively small expense. The bulk of the gains realized from lean come early and then dimishing returns set in without a deeper commitment to the rigor of Six Sigma.  The rigor of Six Sigma is not without its rewards. Between 1998 and 2002, fully deployed Six Sigma programs at Ford, GE, Allied Signal, Honeywell and Motorola resulted in annual savings ranging from 1.2 to 4.5% of revenues.

For most organizations which are early in their quality journey, it is more practical to begin with an investment in lean prior to committing to the more insightful and granular improvements which come from Six Sigma. It is common for Six Sigma projects to be spawned from a lean event.

"In God we trust, all others bring data."
      - W. Edwards Deming