7) Knowledge Management and Six Sigma: Exploring the Potential of Two Powerful Disciplines, Paige Leavitt1) Six Sigma should not be seen as a quality program tasked with reducing defects but as a methodology that helps companies to best meet the needs of their business. KM shares this goal.2) The voice of the customer in the DFSS process is also a potential area for a collaboration of ideas. “In Design For Six Sigma, understanding customer-centric requirements is a key input…to the design process,” O’Dell said. “And if you can use knowledge management tools to better understand what the customer is telling sales people and support people, that information will get back to the people who can make a difference in the design process.”3) Lessons learned from APQC "Issues, issues and opportunities in organizations are not about reducing defects; they are more about responding to new opportunities, using the voice of customer knowledge," O'Dell said. “With both Six Sigma and KM, I'm telling you that you'll get more of what you want, if you start to open up the conversation about a different way of thinking about solving some of these long-term problems. As both Six Sigma that KM have enormous power, they also have some problems that they need help with "Professionals in both arenas can learn from each other. Six Sigma can learn from KM how to recognize knowledge, as well as processes. Joseph Hofer-Alfeis of Siemens said: "Six Sigma is oriented towards product and process quality. If you think of a knowledge-intensive company, 'Six Sigma for knowledge quality' - the quality of expertise, the quality of knowledge flows and the quality of knowledge of the description - should also be a... means of paper... manage the targeted process (for example, an insurance sales agent or a supervisor), while others work to support the process (e.g., an information technology expert providing support to the insurance claims process). Unique project teams are formed for each of the projects and disbanded after these projects are completed, passing the resulting improvement actions to the process owners, people who routinely manage the processes.5) While each project has different goals and specific tools used, overall these projects follow a standardized, structured five-phase project management approach known as “DMAIC” for phases. of definition, measurement, analysis, improvement and control (Schroeder et al. , 2008).6) Project leaders are trained to use practices for gathering, combining, and synthesizing team members' knowledge for use in process improvement (Hoerl, 2001).