Who Invented Six Sigma?

Six Sigma invention can be attributed to Motorola. It all started in the 1970′s, after a japanese firm took over a Motorola Factory that produced Quasar’s TV sets in the USA. They made drastic changes on the way the factory operated and soon they produced TV’s with only 5% of the defects they were previously producing with the same workforce, technology and designs, and the costs of producing the sets were lowered too. The results of the factory revealed something really hard: managerial quality at Motorola was not good, in fact, was really poor. It took a while before Motorola’s executives admitted that their quality was poor.

Then in the 1980′s an engineer named Mikel Harry began analyzing variation in outcomes in the company’s internal procedures, and realized that by measuring variation it would be possible to improve working systems. On the other hand Bill Smith, an engineer of Motorola too, studied the correlation between a product’s
field life and how often that product had been repaired during the manufacturing process. According to [Harry and Schroeder, 2000] “In 1985, Smith presented a paper that concluded that if a product was found defective and corrected during the production process, other defects were bound to be missed and found later by the customer during early use of the product. However, when the product was manufactured error-free, it rarely failed during early use by the consumer.” The cornerstone of Six Sigma is then to improve the whole process rather than bits or pieces of unrelated work tasks

The outstanding performance achieved by Motorola, helped the company to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988. The secret of their success became public knowledge and the Six Sigma revolution was on. The decision to share the insights of the methodology by the then Motorola-president Robert Galvin was key to its widespread use now.

By the mid 1990′s big corporations like Texas Instruments, General Electric and Asea Bown Boveri started their own Six Sigma programs, by 2003 over $100 Billion were reported to be saved thanks to Six Sigma programs. [Cygi et al, 2005].

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REFERENCES & FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Pyzdek, Thomas; Keller, Paul A.(2009) "The Six Sigma Handbook, Third Edition"
McGraw-Hill

Harry, Mikel (PhD); Schroeder, Richard (2000) "Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World's Top Corporations"
Double Day

Six Sigma DMAIC Model