Six Sigma: Breaking Through The Quality Hype

10 Pages 2564 Words

Motorola's Robert Galvin came up with it and breathed life back into the company, snagging a Baldrige Award in the process. Larry Bossidy rebooted AlliedSignal with it and then sold General Electric's Jack Welch on it. GE then made Six Sigma front-page news. Notwithstanding its 15-year history and the usual hype that comes with any concept promising organizations huge bottom-line benefits, the number of companies actually using Six Sigma appears to be quite small. Moreover, the perceptions within the quality industry of Six Sigma methodology vary greatly. So what's the story behind the hype? Is there really some muscle in the methodology, or is Six Sigma simply, as many believe, PR-enhanced total quality management?




TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ii
Chapter
I INTRODUCTION 1
II TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES 3
III BENEFITS MULTIPLY 8
IV SUMMARY 10
REFERENCES 11
AUTOBIOGRAPHY 12



CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The year is 1976. The USA was celebrating its 200th birthday. According to the Juran Institute, there was an emerging interest in this country for training in quality matters. Manufacturing companies were eager to implement quality improvement within their organizations. They were motivated by a very real competitive threat from overseas. Japanese industries had swallowed up a number of our companies and were threatening others. It turned out that quality was dramatically changing the way many organizations were conducting business. There was a new buzzword being used by managers: "Total Quality Management", or "TQM" (Blackiston, 1996, p. 1).
What emerged as some of the key motivators...the drivers? The Juran Institute believes at first sheer terror motivated many American businesses. These companies realized that quality was a matter of life and death. Indeed, many American manufacturers of consumer electronics died before they could react (Blackiston,...