In the mid-1980s, Motorola, under the leadership of Robert W. Galvin, was the initial developer of Six Sigma. Most credit the late Bill Smith forinventing 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. He came 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 goalfor 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 and defect 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 and coauthor 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 planned experimentation (PE).
In the mid-1990s, AlliedSignal’s Larry Bossidy and GE’s Jack Welch saw in Six Sigma a way to lead their organizations’ cultural change through Six Sigma initiatives and also achieve significant cost savings. In 1998, Business reported that GE had saved $330 million through Six Sigma,
Some Six Sigma people equate DFSS with another five-step
Process—DMADV:
• Define—determine the project goals and the requirements
Of customers (external and internal)
6 Designs for Six Sigma
• Measure—assess customer needs and specifications
• Analyze—examine process options to meet customer
Requirements
• Design—develop the process to meet the customer
Requirements
• Verify—check the design to ensure that it’s meeting customer
Requirements.
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 and coauthor 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 planned experimentation (PE).
In the mid-1990s, AlliedSignal’s Larry Bossidy and GE’s Jack Welch saw in Six Sigma a way to lead their organizations’ cultural change through Six Sigma initiatives and also achieve significant cost savings. In 1998, Business reported that GE had saved $330 million through Six Sigma,
Some Six Sigma people equate DFSS with another five-step
Process—DMADV:
• Define—determine the project goals and the requirements
Of customers (external and internal)
6 Designs for Six Sigma
• Measure—assess customer needs and specifications
• Analyze—examine process options to meet customer
Requirements
• Design—develop the process to meet the customer
Requirements
• Verify—check the design to ensure that it’s meeting customer
Requirements.