Six Sigma

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WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?
Daniel L. Quinn

At the end of the day, Six Sigma is much less of a technical program, although it has a lot of technical tools, than it is a leadership and cultural change program.1
Interview with Dave Cote, President and CEO, Honeywell International

We are doing Six Sigma as part of our process improvement initiative. I see Six Sigma, indeed, as the natural next step in how we get process improvement done. Six Sigma is a more high-powered set of tools than our previous methods, plus its basic philosophy forces people like myself, the leaders of the business, to think beyond our existing management techniques and perhaps our existing management philosophy.2
Interview with Stephen J. Senkowski, President and CEO, Armstrong Building Products

Six Sigma is a management framework that, in the past 15 years, has evolved from a focus on process improvement using statistical tools to a comprehensive framework for managing a business. The results that world-class companies such as General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell, Motorola, and many others have accomplished speak for themselves. Six Sigma has become a synonym for improving quality, reducing cost, improving customer loyalty, and achieving bottom-line results.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON SIX SIGMA
We quickly learned if we could control variation, we could get all the parts and processes to work and get to an end result of 3.4 defects per
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WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?

million opportunities, or a Six Sigma level. Our people coined the term and it stuck. It was shorthand for people to understand that if you can control the variation, you can achieve remarkable results.3
Interview with Robert W. Galvin, Chairman Emeritus of Motorola, Inc.

In the mid-1980s, Motorola, under the leadership of Robert W. Galvin, was the initial developer of Six Sigma. Most credit the late Bill...