In 1987 the management at Motorola were concerned about the number of defects and errors contained in their products and called on the expertise of their engineers in an effort to reduce them.
Bill Smith was an American engineer at Motorola, and he proposed to reduce defects by reducing process variation. Based on these recommendations, he launched “The Six Sigma Quality Programme”
Bill Smith created the statistics and formulas required to initiate Six Sigma methodology and presented his ideas to Bob Galvin, CEO of Motorola where they realised that this approach would fully address the quality concerns.
The Six Sigma methodology is to improve overall quality and become statistically free of defects.
Six Sigma follows the framework Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control, which is also referred to as DMAIC. It is a data-driven quality strategy used to improve processes.
The letters in the acronym represent the five phases that make up the improvement process.
Define
A team and its sponsors decide on the parameters of the project and what it needs to achieve.
Measure
The extent of the issue is assessed and quantified with data.
Analyse
The root cause of the problem is investigated using a data driven approach.
Improve
Changes are implemented to eliminate the root cause.
Control
Monitoring activities are designed to ensure the problem does not reoccur
As a result of the implementation of Six Sigma, the quality of Motorola’s product improved substantially. After implementing Six Sigma, Motorola documented savings of over $16 billion due to its adoption of the Six Sigma methodology. It was at this point that they made the methodology public for any company wanting to adopt it into their quality management processes.
Since then, thousands of companies around the world have been using Six Sigma as a way to improve their processes.
