Six Sigma Tools and Techniques

A workshop manager asks: "I have a binder of ten Six Sigma tools. Which one do I start with?" Start with the one that answers the question you cannot answer today. If you cannot say where the time goes, map the process. If you cannot say which complaint matters most, count and rank them. This guide matches six Six Sigma tools to six everyday problems, with an illustrative example for each.

Which Six Sigma tool should you start with when everything feels broken?

Business excellence sounds large, but it is built from small questions that a team can answer with a page of paper. Process excellence programmes bundle those questions with methodologies such as DMAIC and Lean; the tools are the part you pick up on a Monday morning. Most training lists them by project phase. That order is tidy, yet it is not how problems arrive. A manager does not wake up thinking "I am in the Measure phase". She thinks "customers are shouting", "nobody knows why jobs take so long" or "we fixed this last year and it came back".

So this guide is organised by the problem you are holding. The table is the whole map; each row has a section below with a worked example. The examples all come from one imaginary business, a 12-person bicycle repair workshop whose promise is "ready in three working days". Every figure in the examples is illustrative, invented to show the arithmetic, and none of it is real data.