Six Sigma: The Best Business Support Developed By Motorola

Understanding the circumstances that led to the creation of the best improvement methodology: Six Sigma

When we turn our pages back to history, we realise that the Six Sigma principles were pioneered by the Motorola Company in 1980’s to promote quality throughout an organisation.

Motorola is said to be a veteran of Japan battles. In 1970’s, when Motorola was at its peak of success by offering highly reliable products in the telecom sector, the Japanese market started interfering and targeted every business that it was engaged with.

Soon enough, the Japanese built an amazing quality standard that brought them ahead of many American companies. By undercutting Americans on prices causing grave losses in terms of profitability and market share, Japanese made it difficult for companies to keep up with.

The heavy competition and the struggle to keep up with its defective products and customer support took a toll on Motorola’s finances and as a result, they were compelled to take an action.

The management at Motorola summoned to make changes in their operations and beat the Japanese by reducing the amount of errors in their products before they were shipped to factories.
Motorola engineers combined all the best known quality management practices till date and came up with a complete new methodology that was said to be the baseline of Motorola’s quality improvement program.

Bill Smith, an engineer and scientist at Motorola, came up with a methodology called Six Sigma that would standardise defect measurement and drive improvements in manufacturing. When the approach of Six Sigma was taken to the CEO and the management of Motorola, the methodology was appreciated and recognised as the solution to the quality concerns of the company as a whole.

The five phases of the methodology: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control became the key steps for the company to follow. Motorola then started documenting their key processes, aligning those processes to customer requirements, installing measurement systems to continuously monitor these processes and then finally improve the errors and defects.

The development of the Six Sigma approach was the first step taken by Motorola to get back in the game as it gave them the tools to measure and compare the quality improvement rates of their business.

Immediately, their performances improved but the thought of the Japanese being ahead of them still worried the management. Thus, to remain competitive, Motorola came up with a five-year plan to make improvements in their quality by tenfold and dedicated everyone in the company to start working towards the goal.

By the end of five years, every business in Motorola reached their targeted scale of improvement. It was then when the company found about the Japanese market doing 500% better due to the similar technologies and methodologies they have been using for years.

Motorola again set an impossible target for itself which needed to be achieved in a span of two years and targeted to identify 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

After implementing Sig Sigma, Motorola realised how important the methodology has been in improving their processes. They documented saving more than $16 billion after the adoption of Six Sigma. Therefore, Motorola decided to make the application of Six Sigma public for every company so that they would benefit from its results.

Since then, Six Sigma has been a stepping stone in modern times of quality improvement. Thousands of companies around the world have been considering Six Sigma as a way of doing business because it helps in identifying and eliminating waste that do not add any value to the product. This results in improved efficiency, productivity and also cost saving.

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