uality journey are around one or two sigma. The worldwide average is around three sigma. The majority of the companies utilizing six sigma in India are at a low two sigma. An average domestic company is at three sigma, while a good company is at three and a half. Today GE is around three and a half with goals of reaching six sigma by the year 2000. Companies operating at three to four sigma lose 10-15% of their total revenue due to defects.SigmaDefectsOne690,000Two308,000Three66,800Four6,210Five230Six3.4Background of Six SigmaMotorola created the originals formulas in the 1980's. The result was a culture of the quality that permeated throughout Motorola and led to a period unprecedented growth and sales. Its genesis lies in a classic stretch-target set in 1981 by Motorola's CEO, Bob Galvin, to his people: effect a ten-fold improvement in product-failure levels over a 5-year period. Bill Smith, an engineer at the company, realized that such results could not be achieved without going into the core of what caused defects in the first place So, he conducted a statistical correlation between the field-life of a product and the number of flaws that had been spotted and corrected while the product was being manufactured. The results arrived at in 1985, turned out to be positive. In other words, if a product had been found defective and corrected during the production-process, changes were high and other defects had been missed and would show up later during usage.An observation had been made that products rarely failed in the first 3 years of customer-usage. Therefore, the simplest way to prevent product-breakdowns was to ensure that the process prevented defects of any kind, making detection and repair redundant. External support for this argument came from the best-in-class benchmarking that Motorola had been conducting simultaneously. It showed that total quality companies were turning out products that had not been reworked at all. ...
