If you’re on this site you’ll likely already have at least heard of Six Sigma. It is a tried and tested method for improving procedures, making them more efficient and accurate. Six Sigma was designed decades ago but still used in companies throughout the world. It originated in manufacturing, but you can apply it successfully to virtually any department of any organization in any sector.
What is this site for?
I created this site to get my notes in order for taking my Lean Six Sigma exams, but as I’m trying to lay it out logically so I can come back to later, hopefully it will be useful to others too.
I’ve taken several Six Sigma courses, own an unhealthy number of Lean Six Sigma books and worked with many Six Sigma professionals, so this site is me organizing and making sense of the knowledge that I’ve accumulated over the years.
How this site works
There are several different ways to go through the site, depending on how it works best for you:
- The easiest method is probably to go through all my posts one by one
- Go to the section that’s best for you
Working through by belt level
White Belt
In a White Belt qualification, you learn what Six Sigma is all about with a quick overview of Six Sigma and its methodologies. It won’t take you long to do; you can usually get through it in a morning. Best of all, you can often get it very cheaply or even for free.
Yellow Belt
A Yellow Belt is the gateway to Six Sigma; you can’t take part in projects without it, and for many people it’s the first course they take in Six Sigma. Often the main roles you’ll take part in will be data collection, but you can also get involved in more interesting areas such as brainstorming.
A Six Sigma organization usually tries to have a large number of Yellow Belts, so that these roles can be done by staff who usually work with the procedures being measured.
Green Belt
If you’re interested in the more analytical parts of Six Sigma and real value add for your organization, you’ll want to upgrade your Yellow Belt to Green Belt. The main worker for Six Sigma projects, a Green Belt can take a lot of the workload away from a Black Belt, freeing them up for leadership. You will learn most of the tools and methodologies, albeit at a lower level than a Black Belt.
Black Belt
A Black Belt is a Six Sigma expert, who can lead complex projects and even roll out Six Sigma through an organization. If you can pass your Black Belt qualifications, you are a true Six Sigma Ninja!
You’ll know all the sections of DMAIC, DMADV, all parts of lean and all the tools of Lean Six Sigma. More importantly, you’ll know how to put all of these together to revolutionize the efficiency and accuracy of the processes in your organization.
Using Microsoft Excel for Six Sigma
As long as I have my computer on, Microsoft Excel is usually open. It can be used to greatly improve your data collection and analysis, and is valuable for making forms, formulas, data tables and graphs easily.
For now, this section is for calculating Sigma levels, so you can see how close to Six Sigma you are without having to resort to normal distribution lookup tables. I will add other Excel tools as I make them.
Popular pages
Some of our popular pages are:
- If you want to dive straight in and do a project, I’d personally go for DMAIC
- Problem solving tools Brainstorming and Fishbone diagrams
- High level Process mapping tools SIPOC and COPIS
- Lean waste types called muda, and key lean tool 5S (also known as CANDO)
- Speed up calculating DPMO and Sigma level using Excel
- Have a look at the different tools you can use
- If understanding colleagues is key, there’s the terminology
By section
The site is in key areas, so you can go to the section that is of most interest to you where you can see which section you want to read. The ‘previous post’ ‘next post’ buttons at the bottom will then take you in a logical order through that section.
Which Six Sigma belt is right for me?
The belts build on each other, so you can work your way up the stages without having to choose now where you’re going to end up. Which belt you want though depends on your attitude / what you want to get out of it. The stages are:
- I’m not sure if Lean Six Sigma is right for me – White Belt
- I’ve seen other people doing Lean Six Sigma projects and find it interesting, and want to be useful if a project affects my area – Yellow Belt
- The Lean Six Sigma projects in my organization look interesting and worthwhile, and I want to learn some useful tools and get involved on a few projects – Green Belt
- I think Lean Six Sigma is great and I want to learn all the tools, help drive the company to embrace it more and lead projects – Black Belt
- I think the other Black Belts would benefit from my experience and want to help run the Lean Six Sigma organization – Master Black Belt
If you want to find out more, look at the Six Sigma roles page, or look at the individual belt pages.
Whilst I’m building the site, the definite best way to navigate is just going through the posts one by one:
Next post: Six Sigma Belts