[randcraw]

From what I've seen after the attempt to adopt Six Sigma within a large pharmaceutical, 6S has several inescapable vulnerabilities due to not knowing:

1) which important company components produce signals that aren't measurable (e.g. internalities like deep domain knowledge in R&D or externalities like market swings or competitor behaviors),

2) which signals are too dynamic or complex to optimize, and

3) which signals are insignificant, irrelevant, irreproducible, or simply meaningless noise.

Applying Six Sigma to R&D illustrates these caveats nicely.