The History of Six Sigma
1- Six Sigma was started in the mid-1980s. Here was a quality initiative that had a significant role for management in its implementation.
2- Started at Motorola but popularized in the 1990s by AlliedSignal and General Electric, Six Sigma was different than previous approaches to quality improvement.
3- With other quality approaches like Statistical Process Control or Just in Time Manufacturing, management played little if any role other than approval of bringing in external consultants to train the workforce. With Six Sigma, the work begins with management.
4- Motorola is where Six Sigma began.A highly skilled, confident, and trained engineer who knew statistics, Mikel Harry began to study the variations in the various processes within Motorola. He soon began to see that too much variation in any process resulted in poor customer satisfaction and ineffectiveness in meeting the customer requirements.
5- However, unlike other quality efforts that spent most time on measurement, Harry and others at Motorola acted on what processes produced the most variation. They actively engaged their Chief Executive Officer, Bob Galvin, in their work. Who began to manage the variations in all of Motorola’s processes and made Six Sigma the management philosophy in all he did.
6- Lawrence Bossidy Schooled by Jack Welch at General Electric left General Electric in 1991 to take over a large conglomerate called AlliedSignal. he wanted to place his own stamp on management at AlliedSignal
7- Within months, Bossidy had generated significant improvements with Six Sigma, both improving effectiveness and efficiency through focusing on customer measures of effectiveness and generating greater efficiencies through both managing processes and chartering Six Sigma teams to improve performance. Within three years, AlliedSignal was saving literally millions of dollars and improving their reputation with customers while not resorting to cost cutting through downsizing or lay-offs.
8- Jack Welch at General Electric asked AlliedSignal to provide an overview of this management philosophy at his management training campus By the end of 1995, General Electric had decided to make Six Sigma a corporate-wide initiative.General Electric decided to make Six Sigma different than other programs that had been associated with quality. Six Sigma would have both the formal support and active involvement of management.
9- As successful as Motorola and AlliedSignal were in their implementation of Six Sigma, General Electric is the organization that used Six Sigma most impressively to drive improvement in effectiveness and efficiency.
