Six Sigma: Breaking the Quality Hype :: essays research papers

SIX SIGMA BREAKING THROUGH THE QUALITY HYPE partial derivative FULMILLMENTOF THE REQUIREMENTS FOROPERATIONS AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT BUSN 6110Title six-spot Sigma Breaking by the Quality HypDegree     Master of Business AdministrationMotorolas Robert Galvin came up with it and take a breath life back into the company, snagging a Baldrige Award in the process. Larry Bossidy rebooted AlliedSignal with it and then interchange General Electrics 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 undimmed organizations huge bottom-line benefits, the number of companies actually using Six Sigma appears to be sooner small. Moreover, the perceptions within the pure tone industry of Six Sigma methodology vary greatly. So whats the story behind the hype? Is there really some vim in the methodology, or is Six Sigma simply, as many believe, PR-enhanced total select management? TABLE OF CONTENTSPageABSTRACT                                                  iiChapterI     INTRODUCTION                                        1II     TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES                              3III     BENEFITS MULTIPLY                                   8IV     SUMMARY    &nb sp                                        10REFERENCES                                             11AUTOBIOGRAPHY                                             12CHAPTER IINTRODUCTIONThe year is 1976. The USA was celebrating its 200th birthday. According to the Juran Institute, there was an acclivitous interest in this country for training in quality fields. Manufacturing companies were burning to implement quality improvement within their organizations. They were motiva ted 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 ever-changing the way many organizations were conducting business. There was a new buzzword cosmos 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 little 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, 1996, p. 1).The Juran Institute states another(prenominal) important motivator for quality initiatives was the concept of "the costs of poor quality". This relates to all of those costs that would disappear in an organization, if everything were done correctly justifiedly from t he start. We saw early on that most companies were simply throwing away well-nigh 25% of their sales revenues on scrap, repairs, warranties and other costs of quality (Blackiston, 1996, p. 1).As the years went by, the reasons for implementing TQM piled up however, the Juran Institute figured that 80% of the companies that tackled TQM in the mid-eighties failed (Blackiston, 1996, p.1). Although quality improved, TQM seemed to be mired in find and fix the riddle and not worry about the cost.