Their six sigma team apply the Six Sigma methodology in determining the cause of a component failure in the world’s largest commercial twin-engine airplane with millions of components. One incident was the searched for such a needle on a Boeing 777 when a recirculating air fans were rejected during functional tests on the aircraft production line, resulting in costly removal, additional testing and replacement. The team used a fundamental Six Sigma approach to examine data from the fan removals and determine multiple root causes.
Specifically, the process of Six Sigma in the company is: * Defines the real problem and objectives. * Measures the scale of the problem and gathers more information. * Finds root cause. * Identifies solutions and gains management approval to implement. * Monitors the improvements for two years, leveraging the findings to other areas of the company. The success with Six Sigma clearly shows through their results where after 18 fan failures in two years, they went four and a half months without a rejection. Though they haven’t completely eliminated the rejections, they are still close. This team also received encouragement from Supply Management and Procurement Leadership to use Six Sigma for problem solving on other quality investigations associated with component removal. The advantages of using the Six Sigma in Boeing Company is it forces to concentrate on critical issues. Going through this focused process where a team of people define the problem and the objective, identify the stakeholders and work only on issues that are important. It also avoids a “hit and miss” approach by breaking into measurable bites an entire chain of events leading to a problem, and then coming up with a corrective action. Thus, Six Sigma provides a more thorough and proactive approach to solving quality problems, which has a direct influence on costs and improving customer satisfaction. Hence, this forces