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The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Complete Guide to Six Sigma by Thomas Pyzdek, © 1999 by Quality Publishing. It may be ordered from the Quality Publishing Order Form.

Six Sigma at Motorola

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 accommodate reasonable variation in component parts while providing consistently uniform final products. Motorola employees record the defects found in every function of the business, and statistical technologies are made a part of each and every employee's job.

Reducing the "total cycle time"-the time from when a Motorola customer places an order until it is delivered-is another vital part of the company's quality initiatives. In fact, in the case of new products, Motorola's cycle-time reduction is even more ambitious; the clock starts ticking the moment the product is conceived. This calls for an examination of the total system, including design, manufacturing, marketing, and administration.

Motorola management demonstrates its quality leadership in a variety of ways, including top-level meetings to review quality programs with results passed on through the organization. But all levels of the company are involved. Non-executive employees contribute directly through Motorola's Participative Management Program (PMP). Composed of employees who work in the same area or are assigned to achieve a specific aim, PMP teams meet often to assess progress toward meeting quality goals, to identify new initiatives, and to work on problems. To reward high-quality work, savings that stem from team recommendations are shared.

To ensure that employees have the skills necessary to achieve company objectives, Motorola spent in excess of $170 million on worker education between 1983 and 1987. About 40 percent of the worker training provided by the company is devoted to quality matters, ranging from general principles of quality improvement to designing for manufacturability.

Motorola knows what levels of quality its products must achieve to top its competitors. Each of the firm's six major groups and sectors has benchmarking programs that analyze all aspects of a competitor's products to assess their manufacturability, reliability, manufacturing cost, and performance. Motorola has measured the products of some 125 companies against its own standards, verifying that many Motorola products rank as best in their class.

Motorola acknowledges that they made many mistakes. One of the most serious was to start the training for quality at the bottom of the company. Many workers were unable to understand statistical process controls and other techniques without remedial education, and they couldn't turn to their untrained bosses for help. Even those who understood the concepts completely were not able to apply them in the unreceptive workplace. Motorola's director of training and education estimates that Motorola wasted $7 million trying to train from the bottom up. Recognizing their mistake, the company established "Motorola University" and put thousands of Motorola executives through executive training. Bob Galvin himself spent time in the classroom. By 1992 the company was spending $110 million per year on instruction.

As a result of these efforts, Motorola can now perform such feats as building pagers and cell phones in lots ranging from one unit to 100,000. Through mass customization the factory can fill a precise order within minutes of receiving it. Thanks in large part to its six sigma activities, the company dominates such key high-tech industries as pagers, cell phones, and mobile communications, and is a significant force in many others.