Six sigma

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WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?
Daniel L. Quinn

At the end of the day, Six Sigma is much less of a technical program, although it has a lot of technical tools, than it is a leadership and cultural change program.1
Interview with Dave Cote, President and CEO, Honeywell International

We are doing Six Sigma as part of our process improvementinitiative. I see Six Sigma, indeed, as the natural next step in how we get process improvement done. Six Sigma is a more high-powered set of tools than our previous methods, plus its basic philosophy forces people like myself, the leaders of the business, to think beyond our existing management techniques and perhaps our existing management philosophy.2
Interview with Stephen J. Senkowski, President andCEO, Armstrong Building Products

Six Sigma is a management framework that, in the past 15 years, has evolved from a focus on process improvement using statistical tools to a comprehensive framework for managing a business. The results that world-class companies such as General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell, Motorola, and many others have accomplished speak for themselves. Six Sigma hasbecome a synonym for improving quality, reducing cost, improving customer loyalty, and achieving bottom-line results.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON SIX SIGMA
We quickly learned if we could control variation, we could get all the parts and processes to work and get to an end result of 3.4 defects per
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WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?

millionopportunities, or a Six Sigma level. Our people coined the term and it stuck. It was shorthand for people to understand that if you can control the variation, you can achieve remarkable results.3
Interview with Robert W. Galvin, Chairman Emeritus of Motorola, Inc.

In the mid-1980s, Motorola, under the leadership of Robert W. Galvin, was the initial developer of Six Sigma. Most credit the late BillSmith for inventing Six Sigma; Smith, a senior engineer and scientist within Motorola’s Communications Division, had noted that its final product tests had not predicted the high level of system failure rates Motorola was experiencing. He suggested that the increasing level of complexity of the system and the resulting high number of opportunities for failure could be possible causes for this. Hecame to the conclusion that Motorola needed to require a higher level of internal quality, and he brought this idea to then-CEO Bob Galvin’s attention, persuading him that Six Sigma should be set as a quality goal. This high goal for quality was new, as was Smith’s way of viewing reliability of a whole process (as measured by mean time to failure) and quality (as measured by process variability anddefect rates). Motorola had always been a pioneer in the areas of productivity and quality. In the 1980s, Motorola had been the site for presentations of quality and productivity improvement programs by a number of experts, including Joseph M. Juran, Dorian Shainin (our colleague at Rath & Strong), Genichi Taguchi, and Eliyahu Goldratt. Mikel Harry, now president of the Six Sigma Academy andcoauthor of Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations, was an attendee of some of these programs; inspired in part by their thinking, he developed a program for the Government Electronics Division of Motorola that included Juran’s quality journey, Statistical Process Control (SPC), and Shainin’s advanced diagnostic tools (ADT) and plannedexperimentation (PE). Harry then worked with Smith on the Six Sigma initiative. Harry led Motorola’s Six Sigma Institute and later formed his own firm specializing in the subject. Smith and Harry’s initial Six Sigma umbrella included SPC, ADT, and PE. Later, they added Design for Manufacturability (product capability and product complexity), accomplishing quality through projects and linking quality to...