The Sun Sigma initiative -- first announced in the spring of 2000 -- is Sun's version of the Six Sigma program that has been successful at improving quality at major corporations worldwide, including General Electric, Allied Signal/Honeywell, Toshiba and many others.

As many companies found in the 1980s, quality initiatives do not succeed if they are not well understood and adopted throughout the organization. To institutionalize Sun Sigma, Sun has created a training program for all 37,000 Sun employees, beginning with upper-level management. Scott McNealy and the executive staff have already completed Sun Sigma training, which includes two days of training on the Change Acceleration Process (CAP) aimed at shaping a vision of change and mobilizing commitment. Sun Sigma project team members will receive a total of three weeks of training between classroom time and on-the-job application of the training over three months.

In addition, Sun has full-time Sun Sigma project leaders, called Black Belts, who lead individual projects and teams, and Master Black Belts, who coach and mentor teams and assist with employee training. Sun Sigma team members are referred to as Green Belts.

"Sigma" is a letter of the Greek alphabet and is used in statistics as a measure of variation. Joining customer specifications and variation provides the method to evaluate defects per million opportunities (DPMO) that translate into capability index Z. Customer input will determine the goal and improvement required for mission-critical processes. Products and business processes at successful corporations worldwide typically operate at 3 to 3.5 Sigma, which implies a DPMO of 67,000 and 23,000 respectively.

• 6 Sigma: 3.4 DPMO
• 5 Sigma: 230 DPMO
• 4 Sigma: 6210 DPMO
• 3 Sigma: 66,800 DPMO
• 2 Sigma: 308,000 DPMO
• 1 Sigma: 690,000 DPMO

An improvement of one Sigma means a quantum leap forward in quality. For example, a mail delivery system that operates at four Sigma loses 20,000 pieces of mail per hour. A six Sigma mail delivery system loses only seven pieces of mail per hour. An improvement from three Sigma to six Sigma represents a 20,000-fold improvement in quality.

A level of four Sigma would entail 5,000 incorrect surgical operations per week, for another real-life example. A level of six Sigma would be 1.7 incorrect operations per week. Four Sigma would entail 200,000 wrong drug prescriptions each year. Six Sigma would be 68 wrong prescriptions per year. Four Sigma would entail 54 hours of computer system downtime per year. Six Sigma would entail two minutes of downtime per year. [...read more...]

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