Six Sigma: The Roadmap to Customer Impact

Six Sigma is a quality initiative most commonly associated with manufacturing processes, and General Electric has been one of the technique's leading proponents and practitioners. (Its name comes from a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection.) But as this largely promotional piece from GE makes clear, quality is defined by the customer and any successful quality program must always keep the customer in mind. Though not heavy on the detail—you'll have to go elsewhere to get a fuller understanding of what Six Sigma is and how it works—these pages, presenting the point of view of a company that takes quality very seriously, demonstrate that quality management is first and foremost a customer service issue.