Process improvement using Six Sigma – a case study in small scale industry

Nowadays most of the organisations are showing keen interest in using Six Sigma approach to improve their operations performance. Motorola coined the concept of Six Sigma and General Electric popularised it. This case study was conducted at bearing manufacturing facility located at Hyderabad. One of the important steps in bearing manufacturing is inner ring and outer ring processing to tight tolerances. Improvement in the rejection rate of bearing rings was taken up as Six Sigma project. One of the basic aims of Six Sigma is to reduce variation by statistical thinking. Various statistical tools and techniques were employed in this study to improve the operations. Rejection rate of bearing rings has been reduced from 2.7% to 0.65% and sigma level of process increased from 4.04 to 4.44.