what is six sigma.pdf

10029_Bertels_01.r.qxd 12/16/02 9:48 AM Page 1

WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?

Daniel L. Quinn

At the end of the day, Six Sigma is much less of a technical program,

although it has a lot of technical tools, than it is a leadership and cul-

tural change program. 1

Interview with Dave Cote, President and CEO, Honeywell International

We are doing Six Sigma as part of our process improvement initiative. I

see Six Sigma, indeed, as the natural next step in how we get process

improvement done. Six Sigma is a more high-powered set of tools than

our previous methods, plus its basic philosophy forces people like

myself, the leaders of the business, to think beyond our existing manage-

ment techniques and perhaps our existing management philosophy. 2

Interview with Stephen J. Senkowski, President and CEO,

Armstrong Building Products

Six Sigma is a management framework that, in the past 15 years, has

evolved from a focus on process improvement using statistical tools to a com-

prehensive framework for managing a business. The results that world-class

companies such as General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell,

Motorola, and many others have accomplished speak for themselves. Six

Sigma has become a synonym for improving quality, reducing cost, improv-

ing customer loyalty, and achieving bottom-line results.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON SIX SIGMA

We quickly learned if we could control variation, we could get all the

parts and processes to work and get to an end result of 3.4 defects per

10029_Bertels_01.r.qxd 12/16/02 9:48 AM Page 2

WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?

million opportunities, or a Six Sigma level. Our people coined the term

and it stuck. It was shorthand for people to understand that if you can

control the variation, you can achieve remarkable results. 3

Interview with Robert W. Galvin, Chairman Emeritus of Motorola, Inc.

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 for

inventing Six Sigma; Smith, a senior engineer and scientist within Motorola’s

Communications Division, had noted that its final product tests had not pre-

dicted the high level of system failure rates Motorola was experiencing. He

suggested that the increasing level of complexity of the system and the result-

ing 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 goal

for 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 qual-

ity. 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 Strat-

egy 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).

Harry then worked with Smith on the Six Sigma initiative. Harry led

Motorola’s Six Sigma Institute and later formed his own firm specializing in

the subject. Smith and Harry’s initial Six Sigma umbrella included SPC,

ADT, and PE. Later, they added Design for Manufacturability (product capa-

bility and product complexity), accomplishing quality through projects and

linking quality to business performance. 4

Meeting the challenge Galvin had set in 1981 to improve quality by ten-

fold and developing Six Sigma helped Motorola to win the first Malcolm

Baldrige National Quality Award in 1989. In line with Galvin’s policy of

openness and in response to the interest generated by the Baldrige Award,

Motorola shared the details of its Six Sigma framework widely.

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

Week reported that GE had saved $330 million through Six Sigma, double

10029_Bertels_01.r.qxd 12/16/02 9:48 AM Page 3

ANTECEDENTS OF SIX SIGMA

Welch’s previous prediction. Interest in Six Sigma really took off after that

article appeared, an interest that was fed by GE’s continued success with Six

Sigma and Jack Welch’s speeches and books.

SIX SIGMA DEFINED

The Six Sigma of today speaks the language of management: bottom-line

results. It institutionalizes a rigorous, disciplined, fact-based way to deliver

more money to the bottom line through process improvement and process

design projects—selected by the top leadership and led by high potentials

trained as Black Belts or Master Black Belts in Six Sigma—that aim to cre-

ate near-perfect processes, products, and services all aligned to delivering

what the customer wants. In successful implementations, the majority of Six

Sigma projects are selected for measurable bottom-line or customer impact

that is completed within two to six months. The projects deliver through the

application of a well-defined set of statistical tools and process improvement

techniques by well-trained people in an organization that has made it clear

that Six Sigma is a career accelerator.

In our practice, we see companies viewing Six Sigma in two ways: as a set

of powerful tools for improving processes and products and as an approach

for improving both the process- and people-related aspects of business per-

formance. Six Sigma is used as a hands-on approach to developing leadership

and change management skills. The companies that achieve the greatest ben-

efits from Six Sigma leverage the linkages between people, processes, cus-

tomer, and culture. In its 2000 annual report, GE describes the changes

brought by Six Sigma this way: “Six Sigma has turned the Company’s focus

from inside to outside, changed the way we think and train our future leaders

and moved us toward becoming a truly customer-focused organization.” 5

ANTECEDENTS OF SIX SIGMA

While Six Sigma was invented at Motorola in the late 1980s, Six Sigma has

had antecedents over the past 100 years. In this section we highlight some of

the important developments, methodologies, and lessons learned that Six

Sigma integrates.

As far back as 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith identified the

economies of scale made possible with specialization in manufacturing. Dur-

ing the early years of the twentieth century, systems were developed for dis-

aggregating manufacturing work processes into subsystems and components

in the effort to increase efficiency. Modern organizations are still based on the

specialization of labor and the fragmentation of processes into simpler tasks.

These principles are generally thought of as starting with Frederick W. Tay-

lor and the scientific theory of management. We’ll start our look backward

with Taylor.

10029_Bertels_01.r.qxd 12/16/02 9:48 AM Page 4

How Companies Define Six Sigma

It is enlightening to compare how various companies—including leading

proponents of Six Sigma—define it for their employees and their customers.

General Electric: What Is Six Sigma?

The Road Map to Customer Impact

“First, what it is not. It is not a secret society, a slogan, or a cliché. Six Sigma

is a highly disciplined process that helps us focus on developing and deliv-

ering near-perfect products and services. Why ‘Sigma’? The word is a sta-

tistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection.

The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many

‘defects’ you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to

eliminate them and get as close to ‘zero defects’ as possible. Six Sigma has

changed the DNA at GE—it is now the way we work—in everything we do

and in every product we design.” 6

TRW: What Is Six Sigma?

“Six Sigma is a structured and disciplined, data-driven process for improv-

ing business. TRW is committed to the implementation of Six Sigma

focusing on how we can dramatically improve our competitiveness by

increasing customer focus, enhancing employee involvement, instilling

positive change into our culture and ultimately creating bottom and top

line growth. At the highest level, Six Sigma is all about satisfying customer

needs profitably. It is a highly disciplined methodology that helps develop

and effectively deliver near-perfect products and services. It will help

TRW in all of our operations, engineering, manufacturing and staff areas.” 7

Honeywell: Six Sigma Plus

“Six Sigma is one of the most potent strategies ever developed to acceler-

ate improvements in processes, products, and services, and to radically

reduce manufacturing and/or administrative costs and improve quality. It

achieves this by relentlessly focusing on eliminating waste and reducing

defects and variations.

“Leading-edge companies are applying this bottom-line enhancing

strategy to every function in their organizations—from design and engi-

neering to manufacturing to sales and marketing to supply management—

for dramatic savings.

“Now, Honeywell has developed a new generation of Six Sigma...Six

Sigma Plus is Morris Township, NJ–headquartered Honeywell’s principal

engine for driving growth and productivity across all its businesses, including

aerospace, performance polymers, chemicals, automation and control, trans-

portation, and power systems, among others. In addition to manufacturing,

Honeywell applies Six Sigma Plus to all of its administrative functions.” 8

10029_Bertels_01.r.qxd 12/16/02 9:48 AM Page 5

ANTECEDENTS OF SIX SIGMA

Was Six Sigma Part of the Natural

Progression of Quality, or Was It a Totally

New Event and a New Thrust?

BOB GALVIN : I think it was both. You could lean either way in terms of the

natural intelligence that finally emerged. Was it a great discovery or just

remarkably good mathematics and common sense? You can interpret it

either way. 9

MIKEL HARRY : I think Six Sigma is now squarely focused on quality of

business, where TQM is concerned with the business of quality. That is,

when you adopt TQM, you become involved in the business of doing qual-

ity, and when you adopt Six Sigma, you’re concerned about the quality of

business. In a nutshell, TQM is a defect-focused quality improvement ini-

tiative, whereas Six Sigma is an economics-based strategic business man-

agement system. Didn’t start off that way, but it has evolved that way.

So I see Six Sigma as a vector change. As I look across the history of

quality from the era of craftsmanship, it’s fairly continuous; each step is a

logical continuance of the preceding step, built off the same fundamental

core beliefs and principles, whereas Six Sigma represents a radical depar-

ture from that continuum. It’s actually a reassessment of quality from a

whole new perspective and frame of reference. It’s a reinvention of the his-

tory, if you will, but it’s a birth of a new history, and that’s the way to say

it. It’s been the evolution of a business management revolution. 10

1900 to 1920s: Scientific Management and Statistics

Taylor and Scientific Management. Frederick W. Taylor’s techniques,

which became known as scientific management, made work tangible and

measurable through analyzing manufacturing processes and turning them

into a set of tasks that could be standardized and made repetitive. With work

fragmented into a multitude of tasks, a managerial system was then required

to control work. The concept of the separation of planning and execution was

central to Taylor’s system. Taylor advocated planning departments staffed by

engineers with the following responsibilities:

• Developing scientific methods for doing work

• Establishing goals for productivity

• Establishing systems of rewards for meeting the goals

• Training the personnel in how to use the methods and thereby meet

the goals

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: