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Six sigma and Total Quality Management
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Chung Yuan Christian University Taiwan, R.O.C. 1. The practices and implementation of Six Sigma
In the past two decades, Six Sigma methodology has been widely adopted by industries and non-profit organizations throughout the world. In this section, we demonstrate the development of Six Sigma program, and discuss the features and the five steps of the improvements 1.1 The introduction of Six Sigma Six Sigma methodology was first espoused by Motorola in the mid 1980s. (Antony & Banuelas, 2002; Wiklund & Wiklund, 2002). At that time, Motorola was facing Japanese competition in the electronics industry and needed to make drastic improvements in its levels of quality (Harry and Schroeder, 2000; Linderman et al., 2003). A Six Sigma initiative ,which is originally focused on manufacturing process and product quality (Harry & Schroeder, 2000), is also designed to change the culture in an organization through breakthrough improvement in all aspects of the business (Breyfogle III et al., 2001, p.32). The Six Sigma architects at Motorola focused on making improvements in all operations within a process—thus producing results far more rapidly and effectively (Harry & Schroeder, 2000). The successful implementation of the Six Sigma program in Motorola led to huge benefits. Motorola recorded a reduction in defects and manufacturing time, and also began to reap financial rewards. Within four years, the Six Sigma program had saved the company $2.2 billion (Harry & Schroeder, 2000). The crowning achievement was being recognized with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (Breyfegle III et al., 2001; Wiklund & Wiklund, 2002). IBM, SONY, and Allied Signal successfully followed Motorola in implementing Six Sigma. Allied Signal began its Six Sigma activities in the early 1990s, It successfully attained savings of US$2 billion during a
References: 27 Hansson, Johas & Eriksson, Henrik, (2002), “The Impact of TQM on financial performance”, Measuring Business Excellence, vol Quality Management and Six Sigma McAdam, Rodney & McKeown, Michael, (1999), “Life after ISO 9000: An Analysis of the Impact of ISO 9000 and Total Quality Management on Small Business in Northern Ireland”, Total Quality Management, Vol 29 Wiklund, Hakan & Wiklund, Pla Sandvik, (2002), “Widening the six sigma concept: An approach to improve organizational learning”, Total Quality Management, Vol Published online 16, August, 2010 Published in print edition August, 2010 If you do not measure, you do not know, and if you do not know, you cannot manage How to reference In order to correctly reference this scholarly work, feel free to copy and paste the following: Ching-Chow Yang (2010) InTech China Unit 405, Office Block, Hotel Equatorial Shanghai No.65, Yan An Road (West), Shanghai, 200040, China Phone: +86-21-62489820 Fax: +86-21-62489821