The Integration Of Six Sigma Theory, Together With Its Software Tool Minitab And ERP Quality Sub-system

The theory of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) combines the customer's demands, the internal manufacturing activities of the company, and the manufacturing resources of the suppliers together, represents the idea of "Manufacturing On Demand". As ERP and its application software have been successfully applied in many companies, the management mechanism has also been gradually changed and it is possible for the companies to integrate their materials, funds and information, which promotes both of the benefit and efficiency.And Six Sigma Theory is a method based on actual data, which provided kinds of useful statistical tools and the DMAIC process improvement approaches. Six Sigma Theory has been widely adopted to improve the customer satisfaction and gain the continuous process improvement and success. Many companies are eager to keep or improve the quality level of their products or service to the six sigma level—a nearly perfect quality level.This paper focuses on how to integrate the ERP and Six Sigma Theory organically so as to take the fully advantage of both.Specifically, the paper analyzes the feasibility of the integration at first, and discusses the corresponding levels of integration and provides an integration model, combining with the operational process, the managerial levels and the integration levels. It also describes the processes of the integration in detail.Secondly, this paper analyzes, designs and achieves the integration interface, and it defines the extracting data types. It also brings forward an extracting data structure named "Backward Structure", and develops the corresponding application programs of the integration interface.Finally, an actual case is given to describe how to analyze the raw materials procurement process by using the current ERP system and Six Sigma Theory to carry out the define, measure, analysis, improve and control steps, it also gives practicable solutions for process improvement and control, which significantly cuts off the purchasing costs and quality loss costs.