Do You Need to Know How to Calculate the Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO) of your Products or Processes?
Did You Know You Can Do a DPMO on Budgeting Processes, Say for a SAP Project?
Many SAP customers have embarked on a lean six sigma effort. But they find they need a common way to measure quality in order to determine which sigma level they are operating at.
Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO)
What Is DPMO and How Do You Use It?
DPMO (Defects Per Million Opportunities) is a measure used in quality management to assess how often errors occur in a process, relative to the number of chances for those errors to happen.
Analogy: Imagine you run a bakery that produces cookies. Every time you bake a batch, you have a checklist with 1,000 specific things that could potentially go wrong (like burning the cookies or adding too much sugar). If you bake 1,000 batches and find that 10 things went wrong across all those batches, you would have 10 defects out of 1,000,000 opportunities (since 1,000 batches x 1,000 opportunities per batch = 1,000,000).
So, in simple terms, DPMO tells you how many defects you would expect to find if you had 1 million opportunities for something to go wrong. The lower the DPMO, the better the quality of the process.
Want to Know How to Calculate DPMO From Sigma Level
In order to both determine what any specific product's sigma level is or in order to compare 2 or more item's quality, you need a common way to measure their quality level. And thus was born the concept of Defects Per Million Opportunities or DPMO. With this tool, you can:
- Convert varying levels of defects per unit produced into a 'universally comparable' number
- Measure defects and sigma levels for both manufactured products as well as processes, such as processing a check
- Convert Apples-to-Oranges comparison's to Apples-to-Apples
You can get your free copy of this simple yet powerful, proven tool from the world of Total Quality Management by completing the form on the right.