Exceptional quality also has a great impact on the user experience and encourages word-of-mouth advertising for product offerings. In addition, achieving superior quality standards has a positive impact on increasing customer retention. Excellence in product quality is important for both the retail and business-to-business markets. Quality can be used as a strategy by companies to build effective competitive barriers to market entry.

Six Sigma Role in Quality

One way to measure quality, is to calculate the number of defects over a given sample size. A methodology that is widely used to reduce the number of defects, thereby improving and maintaining quality, is Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a quality process that specifies the number of defects in a product cannot exceed 3.4 defects per million. This is a quality goal that many companies, from commercial bakers to computer chip manufacturers, strive to attain. Reducing the number of defects to 3.4 per million or less does not happen by chance or luck, and requires proper planning and discipline to keep the number of defects to appropriate levels.

Six Sigma provides a number of tools that are used to reduce variability in an organization’s business processes. There are two common mythologies used in Six Sigma which are used in different situations depending on if the process under review currently exists or is a new process being developed.

Define, Measure, Analyze, and Improve Control (DMAIC) is a Six Sigma method used for examining existing processes that fail to meet desired quality specifications. Define, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify (DMADV) is a Six Sigma method used to ensure that proper levels of quality are built into the product and development processes from the very start.

Many of our customers use CS Odessa’s ConceptDraw Office to assist in their Six Sigma implementation. ConceptDraw Office is a unique business software solution that combines business productivity methods and data visualization with project management technologies. It is well adapted to support both DMAAIC and DMADV methodologies. There is no other software product on the market as well equipped to enable one to observe and analyze quality processes inside and out. ConceptDraw Office makes it a snap to plan, develop, manage, and document quality processes.

ConceptDraw Office is comprised of ConceptDraw MINDMAP, ConceptDraw PROJECT, and ConceptDraw PRO all packaged into one seamless software tool kit.