How does the balanced scorecard compare to the Six Sigma management approach?
While the balanced scorecard is almost always described as a strategic management system, Six Sigma is usually defined in terms of quality improvement related to internal business processes. Six Sigma is defined in Quality America as: “… a Quality Improvement methodology structured to reduce product or service failure rates to a negligible level (six sigma is equivalent to approximately 3.4 failures per million events). To achieve these levels of quality, Six Sigma encompasses all aspects of a business, including management, service delivery, design, production and customer satisfaction.” Six Sigma was developed at Motorola, GE and Allied Signal, and is widely used in many businesses. While the original concept has expanded over the years to become more strategic, most balanced scorecard organizations will use Six Sigma as project initiatives to improve the efficiency of internal business processes. Both Six Sigma and balanced scorecard practitioners use similar best practices in manag
