AN INIATIVE TO IMPLEMENT SIX SIGMA IN PROCESS INDUSTRY : A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Organizations worldwide are under continuing pressure to control costs, maintain high levels of safety and quality and meet customer’s expectations. Six Sigma is a powerful breakthrough improvement business strategy that enables companies to use simple but powerful statistical methods to define, measure, analyze, improve and control processes for achieving and sustaining operational excellence. So far, much of the Six Sigma work has been done in manufacturing or production industry where the product is physically available even at intermediate stages of production for making necessary measurements and analysis. The case study is taken from Thermal Power Plant. Implementation of Six Sigma approach to process industry starts with the observing and analyzing of three engines of Six Sigma i.e. Process improvement, Process design/redesign and process management and with the application of a five step improvement cycle that has become increasingly common in Six Sigma organization; defi...