Total Quality Management (TQM)

Everyone is talking about it; it's on every manager's mind and it's definitely taking some people places. Read on to know all about Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a method that employs statistical analysis to reduce or even eliminate defects, defined as "unacceptable deviation from the mean", in manufacturing and service related processes. It stands for Six Standard Deviations (sigma being the Greek alphabet representing standard deviation). Broadly, Six Sigma has three aspects: the metric, the methodology and its philosophy. Together, they help reduce the defects per million opportunities (DPMO) to 3.4, which is the Six Sigma benchmark.