Software AG products support you in implementing the DMAIC method (see chapter Introduction to Six Sigma) at all stages of your Six Sigma project. The various products support you in determining the scope of a Six Sigma project, identifying problematic areas in your corporate processes, and rendering key success factors measurable.
PPM provides you with all necessary methods and tools, in particular for the Measure, Analyze, and Control phases of the DMAIC cycle.
PPM automatically measures and analyzes the performance of your processes and evaluates them statistically. The results of your process analyses can be integrated into Performance Dashboard, providing an easy way of continuously monitoring and publishing them during your Six Sigma project. This enables you to embed the results of Six Sigma initiatives directly in the process environment and process controlling system in your company and use them for process optimization.
The specific methods that PPM provides you with for your Six Sigma projects include process mining, outlier analysis, comprehensive chart types, particularly the distribution chart, a special Six Sigma operator and a dedicated Six Sigma plug-in to integrate the Minitab® statistics software.
Process mining
You can use Process mining to identify suspected deviations and weak spots in your processes. Process mining automatically identifies conspicuous fluctuations in measure values for particular dimensions.
Outlier analysis
With the outlier analysis, you can identify process instances with a certain measure value above or below the average value or a defined limit value. You can use the runppmanalytics command line program to automatically identify all process instances with critical behavior (i.e., whose measure values lie outside a range of +/- 3 sigma).
Distribution chart
In a distribution chart, you can display the frequency distribution of a distributable measure's values for a number of process or function instances. This can be used to display the average value, standard deviation, median and percentiles, for example.
Six Sigma operator
The Six Sigma operator is available for defining user-defined measures. It calculates the sigma value for the relevant success rate, e.g., 30.8% success rate = > sigma = 1, 93.32% success rate = > sigma = 3.
Performance Dashboard
Performance Dashboard provides an overview of the performance of all the main processes in your company. Based on an analysis of various measures and user-defined planned values, Performance Dashboard uses performance indicators to show the extent to which your processes are actually achieving the defined objectives.
Minitab®
PPM provides an interface to the leading statistics software Minitab®, which is used for statistical evaluations in Six Sigma projects. Various options are available to you for evaluating your PPM data statistically in Minitab®. You can call up Minitab® from the PPM user interface or from the command line. In addition, you have the option of automatically running Minitab® macros using the PPM user interface or batch files. In Performance Dashboard, you can display graphics of the Minitab® evaluations and thus monitor the sustainability of Six Sigma projects.
Tip
The PPM Help topics section of the online help contains further information, e.g., how to perform process mining and an outlier analysis in PPM, how to create a distribution chart and configure user-defined measures.
Information on using the ppmanalytics command line program is provided in the PPM Customizing user guide.
A detailed description of how to use Performance Dashboard is available in the Performance Dashboard User Guide.
Details of how to use the Minitab® application in PPM are provided from chapter Use Minitab® in PPM onwards.