Six Sigma applied throughout the lifecycle of an automated decision system

Automated decision-making systems have been deployed in many industrial, commercial, and financial applications. The needs for such systems are usually motivated by requirements for variation reduction, capacity increase, cost and cycle time reduction, and end-to-end traceability of the transaction or product. Before we can use any automated decision-making system in a production environment we must develop a strategy to insure high quality throughout its entire lifecycle. We need to guarantee its performance through a rigorous Design for Six Sigma process (DFSS). This process includes validation, tuning, and production testing of the system. Once the system is in production we must monitor and maintain its performance over its lifecycle. In this paper we will outline the Six Sigma process that lead to the deployment of an automated decision-making system in one of the General Electric Financial Assurance businesses.