ABSTRACT
The following is a brief overview of what Six Sigma and TPM are and how they fit together.
Six Sigma is best defined as a business process improvement approach that seeks to find and eliminate causes of defects and errors, reduce cycle times, reduce costs of operations, improve productivity, meet customer expectations, achieve higher asset utilization, and improve return on investment (ROI) (Agustiady and Badiru, 2012a). Six Sigma deals with producing datadriven results through management support of the initiatives. Six Sigma pertains to sustainability because without the actual data, decisions would be made on trial and error. Sustainable environments require having actual data to back up decisions so that methods are used to have improvements for future generations. The basic methodology of Six Sigma includes a five-step method approach that consists of the following, which is abbreviated with the acronym DMAIC (Cudney and Kestle, 2010):
Define: Initiate the project, describe the specific problem, identify the project’s goals and scope, and define key customers and their critical-to-quality (CTQ) attributes.
