Bill Smith

Bill Smith was an American engineer and statistician who introduced Six Sigma at Motorola in 1986, the origin of the data-driven quality methodology later adopted across manufacturing and services worldwide. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who also studied at the University of Minnesota's School of Business, Smith spent nearly 35 years in engineering and quality assurance before joining Motorola in 1987 as vice president and senior quality assurance manager for the Land Mobile Products Sector. Analyzing warranty claims and field failures, he developed statistical methods for identifying and removing the causes of process variation, proposing to CEO Bob Galvin that defect reduction be pursued as a rigorous, company-wide statistical discipline rather than after-the-fact inspection; the resulting Six Sigma methodology, aiming for no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities, was central to Motorola winning the inaugural Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988. Smith died of a heart attack at Motorola in 1993; Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management later established an endowed scholarship in his name, and he was posthumously named the inaugural inductee of the Six Sigma Hall of Fame in 2010.