Methods
Six Sigma
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Six Sigma is a data-driven quality-management method that seeks to hold process defects to no more than about 3.4 per million opportunities, taking its name from the statistical symbol sigma for standard deviation and the goal of fitting six standard deviations of process variation between the process mean and its nearest specification limit. Motorola engineer Bill Smith introduced the approach in 1986 after tracing a link between how often a defect occurred during assembly and how soon a finished product failed in a customer's hands; he brought the proposal directly to Motorola chief executive Bob Galvin, who backed it company wide. Motorola credited Six Sigma with major quality gains and won the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988, and the method was later adopted widely across manufacturing and service industries, building on the earlier statistical quality control practices Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming had established.
Facts
Core PrincipleDefine, measure, analyze, improve and control a process, using statistical analysis to remove the causes of variation and defects, rather than only inspecting finished output. 1 Origin Year1986 is when Motorola engineer Bill Smith proposed the approach to CEO Bob Galvin; Motorola registered Six Sigma as a trademark in the early 1990s once it had spread beyond his original team. Cross-Tradition Connections
Invented By
Smith drafted the statistical methods and proposed them to CEO Bob Galvin, introducing Six Sigma at Motorola in 1986.
Preceded By
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