Six Sigma at Motorola, Inc. ^[1]

Motorola learned about quality the hard way: by being consistently beaten in the competitive marketplace. When a Japanese firm took over a Motorola factory that manufactured television sets in the United States, they promptly set about making drastic changes in the way the factory operated. Under Japanese management, the factory was soon producing TV sets with 1/20th the number of defects they had produced under Motorola management. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the company responded to the competitive pressure by engaging in a publicity campaign decrying unfair competition and calling for political protection solutions. Finally, even Motorola s own executives had to admit our quality stinks, (Main, 1994) and Motorola decided to take quality seriously. Motorola s CEO at the time, Bob Galvin, started the company on the quality path and became a business icon largely as a result of what he accomplished in quality at Motorola.

Today, Motorola is known worldwide as a quality leader. To accomplish its quality and total customer satisfaction goals, Motorola concentrates on several key operational initiatives. At the top of the list is Six Sigma Quality, a statistical measure of variation from a desired result. In concrete terms, Six Sigma translates into a target of no more than 3.4 defects per million products, customer services included. At the manufacturing end, this requires robust designs that...