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

SIX SIGMA BREAKING THROUGH THE QUALITY HYPEPARTIAL FULMILLMENTOF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR trading operations AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT BUSN 6110Title hexad Sigma Breaking through the Quality HypDegree     Master of Business AdministrationMotorolas Robert Galvin came up with it and breathed life bottom into the company, snagging a Baldrige Award in the process. Larry Bossidy rebooted AlliedSignal with it and then sold General Electrics Jack Welch on it. GE then made Six Sigma front-page news. Notwithstanding its 15-year history and the coarse hype that comes with any concept promising organizations huge bottom-line benefits, the number of companies actually using Six Sigma appears to be quite small. Moreover, the perceptions within the tint industry of Six Sigma methodology vary greatly. So whats the story behind the hype? Is there really some muscle in the methodology, or is Six Sigma simply, as many a(prenominal) another(prenominal) believe, PR-enhanced total quali ty management? TABLE OF CONTENTSPageABSTRACT                                                  iiChapterI     INTRODUCTION                                        1II     TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES                              3III     BENEFITS reproduce                                   8IV     SUMMARY                                              10REFERENCES                                             11AUTOBIOGRAPHY                                             12CHAPTER IINTRODUCTIONThe year is 1976. The USA was celebrating its 200th birthday. According to the Juran land, there was an emerging interest in this country for training in quality matters. Manufacturing companies were eager to implement quality improvement within their organizations. The y were motivated by a in truth 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 changing the way many organizations were conducting business. There was a new buzzword being 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 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 originally they could react (Blackiston, 1996, p. 1).The Juran Institute states another 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 do correctly right from the start. We saw early on that most companies were simply throwing away about 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 1980s failed (Blackiston, 1996, p.1). Although quality improved, TQM seemed to be mired in find and fix the job and not worry about the cost.