Teaching Six Sigma Concepts In An Engineering College

• Published in: Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers p. 13.1174.1
• Main Authors: Kim, Hyerim, Kim, Jiyong, Yoon-Su, Baek, Moon, Il
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta American Society for Engineering Education-ASEE 22.06.2008
• Subjects: Business; Colleges & universities; Continuous improvement; Creativity; Curricula; Customer satisfaction; Customer services; Decision making; Defects; Engineers; Green belts; Learning; Product design; Profitability; Six Sigma; Skills; Students

Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology currently being employed across various types of business and industry. DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) has been developed more recently with the goal to apply the Six Sigma principles for the improvement of existing products and processes. The Six Sigma approaches provide a disciplined way of solving problems, eliminating defects and improving business results. In order to increase students’ creative ability, college should provide them with the Six Sigma. Learning about such a well- structured approach and developing related skills would enable today's students to become tomorrow's more effective employees. In this program, fifty-three students in the class are divided into 13 groups. As project, each group finds college facilities and services to be improved and tries to solve these problems with DMAIC. The curriculum in this class furnishes instant feedback to the students by solving the problems directly associated with them. The students’ creative thinking and power of expressing are also improved by learning various creative skills and teamwork. As the results of this class, 52 out of 53 students have acquired the honor of receiving Green belt. As the industries are growing up on large scale and high density, the demand for more creative engineers is increasing. Engineers need to have abilities to handle out multi tasks simultaneously. Therefore the engineer who not only is an expert in the industry field but also has creativity and cooperating skill is required and it is a new role of colleges to educate and discipline these novel skills. In this paper, the curriculum including the education for the theory of Six Sigma is developed as shown in Figure 1. The curriculum proposed in this paper consists of two contents; 1) Lectures for Six Sigma which include the definition, procedure and applications; 2) Group project which is performed by students, applying the theory of Six Sigma to real problems. Six Sigma is one of creativity improvement methods, which is a data-driven, fact based, decision making management tool. It is used to improve the profitability of a business enterprise by reducing the waste and defects while improving the quality of products, processes and services, thus increasing the customer satisfaction. Six Sigma is widely used in industry to improve the efficiency of product design, development, manufacturing and marketing. The Greek letter Six Sigma(б) in the context of mathematical statistics represents standard deviation. However, in industry, б is used as a measure of performance variation. Industry’s performance is measured by the sigma level of their business performance. Traditionally industry operates on three sigma (3б), translated into 670,000 defects per million opportunities. Six Sigma (6б) means 3.45 defects per million opportunities, which is near error-free business performance.1 DMAIC refers to a data-driven quality strategy for improving processes, and it is an abbreviation for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.