Six Sigma Pricing: Improving Pricing Operations to Increase Profits

11Analyze Phase

I think we ought always to entertain our opinionswith some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.—Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

11.1 Introduction

Analysis is the heart of Six Sigma, as it is for any quality approach. The purpose of the Analyze phase is to identify and understand the reasons for the variation of the output measure and/or ways that this variation can be controlled. Statistics is useful for this analysis but is only a part of this, because there are other ways of identifying reasons for defects.

Suppose the output measure is the discount for a flagship SKU in transactions. The variation in discounts results in some transactions having too high (or too low) ...