I would like to understand how statistically set the target for any productivity or quality improvement projects. Often it has been decided based on the industry experience or benchmark across industry. However this become more subjective. Any ideas or views will help me to sell the aggressive target set in the project objective

Hello Chandrasekar, 

 

One common thumb rule for quality improvement projects is to target 50% defect reduction. However, a realistic target must always make business sense. (The cost of doing the project must be far lesser than the benefits obtained from it). 

 

Target setting also depends on risk taking ability of the company. When a company is new to improvement journey, bigger goals are possible but (due to risk perception) commonly smaller goals are set. 

 

The goal setting also depends on the type of project. DMADV shall commonly allow bigger goals as compared to DMAIC. 

 

My advice would be to proceed with goal setting with any subjective method but to confirm it with business sense. 

Thanks for your reply Vishwadeep. I am exactly following the same approach during my project facilitation

I am going to conduct a subjective rating and ranking class to my colleagues some time later next week.

Always I have an habit of giving practical examples to make them understand. In this case I am breaking my head to give the examples . Can you please help me

You may like to take examples for tea/ wine tasters or those of olympic judges. You may like to do some youtube search for useful videos in these lines. Hope this helps. 

Thank you very much!!

One of the major differences between Six Sigma and other improvement  approaches is its significant dependence on data based approach using

 

statistical methods.

 

In Six Sigma, we first convert a real life practical problem into a statistical problem. This is like modeling a process.

The process response is usually called “Key Process Output Variable†(KPOV).

 

Examples of KPOVs could be:

• Yield of a process
• Quality Level such as customer acceptance
• Market Share
• Cycle Time
• Productivity
• Health Index
• Customer Satisfaction Index
• Repair Time
• Reliability
• Down Time
• Inventory Turns

As we may observe, our objective will be to maximize some of these KPOVs such as Yield, Market Share, Customer Satisfaction Index, Productivity, Inventory Turns.

On the other hand, we would like to minimize some of the KPOVs.

 

For example, Cycle Time, Repair Time, Down Time, Rejections.

Thus our first task is to decide the objective of our Six Sigma Project, its current level and our target.

 

While Six Sigma Level of achievement corresponds to 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO), we cannot reach this level without a series of Six Sigma Projects in the same direction. The target level of KPOV should be decided by expectation of your customers and industry benchmarks.

 

Thus if the current yield of a process is 85%, we may strive for 90% as a next target.

Later, we may take projects to achieve next levels of achievements. Usually, the difficulty levels increase in geometric proportion

From 85% to 90% or increase through geometric proportion can be continuous process improvement initiatives. However GB and BB projects focus on breakthrough improvements where we need to set some aggressive targets at the same time it should be realistic.

Yes I agree with you Mr chandrashekar. .

Yes..iam agree with is...