In the face of stiff competition, companies and organizations scramble for ways to achieve a head start on others and survive. They design measurement standards to check on quality of their products and services.
Many measurement standards, namely, Cpk, Zero Defects, etc., started popping up. Nothing came off until a quality management program using statistical methods was applied to business processes. It improved operating efficiency, reduced variation, defects, and waste.
The concept of Six Sigma was then born. In the early 1980s, Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder at Motorola created a process improvement strategy. Another Motorola engineer, however, took credit for coining the term “Six Sigma.” A letter in the Greek alphabet, “sigma” is used to assign the distribution about the mean or average of any process or procedure. As a process measure, it means 3.4 defects per million opportunities.
With Chairman Bob Galvin at the helm in the early and mid-1980s, Motorola engineers decided to standardize the way defects were counted. They wanted to measure the defects per million opportunities. Six Sigma provided the answer. It addressed quality concerns throughout the organization, from manufacturing to support functions. Consequently, Motorola posted more than $16 Billion in savings and went on to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988, the highest award given to companies that demonstrate excellence in Total Quality Management. Until today, Motorola continues to implement Six Sigma throughout its own enterprise. Through the Motorola University, the company has extended the benefit of its Six Sigma expertise to other organizations worldwide.
Six Sigma has evolved over time. It has become more than just a quality system like TQM or ISO. It is a way of doing business. As Geoff Tennant describes in his book Six Sigma: SPC and TQM in Manufacturing and Services, “…Six Sigma can be seen as a vision, a philosophy, a symbol, a metric, a goal, a methodology.”
It is not surprising then that more than a hundred other companies around the globe have adopted Six Sigma as a way of doing business. It also helps that many of America’s leaders openly praise the benefits of Six Sigma: Larry Bossidy of Allied Signal, now Honeywell, and Jack Welch of General Electric Company lead the pack. Rumor has it that Larry and Jack were playing golf when Jack bet Larry that he could implement Six Sigma faster and with greater results at GE than Larry did at Allied Signal. The results speak for themselves.
