The first thing you should know is that Six Sigma at GE Plastics is a discipline. There are people in every business and business unit who are its emissaries (called Champions, Green Belts, Master Black Belts, etc.) and have been trained in Six Sigma philosophy to teach others the statistical tools at its heart. As project and team leaders, these emissaries ensure that Six Sigma is incorporated into every process, product, and undertaking.

Secondly, Six Sigma is a statistic. The Greek letter sigma is used to describe a unit or value of efficiency in processes and procedures. The higher the rating, the lower the number of defects.

For example, if you wash one hundred coffee mugs, but happen to break one, you are operating at 99% efficiency. 99% efficiency translates statistically to 3.8 Sigma. Now, if you improve your efficiency and start washing coffee mugs at 6 Sigma, you would not break another coffee mug until you had washed 294,117 more. That's the level of quality control we're after. That's 99.99966% perfect.

Now, here's where it gets complicated: above all else, Six Sigma is a process. That means that the statistics above need to be translated into real-world operating procedures. GEP does this by working with our customers to identify those vital attributes which have the most impact on quality. (They can vary widely from material purity to on-time delivery.) These attributes are called "CTQs" - Critical to Quality characteristics.

Once the CTQs have been defined, they can be measured. With measurements, we can analyze results. Improve results. And control results. This step-by-step process is called DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. And it helps us design new processes and products that incorporate Six Sigma from the start.

Needless to say, Six Sigma thinking has revolutionized GE and GE Plastics. In 1999, it saved us more than $2 billion. But equally important, it has focused us squarely on what is most important to our customers and trained us how to deliver it. Six Sigma is the way we work - in everything we do and in every product we design.