Evolution of Six Sigma

This is a timeline of the people and events that played critical roles in the evolution of Six Sigma:

• 
  Frederick W. Taylor in the 1890s and early 1900s;
• 
  Taylor’s systematic study of the use of time and motion by workers prefigured Walter Shewhart’s application of statistical methods to the control of manufacturing quality in the 1920s;
• 
  World War II;
• 
  The application of mathematics to problems of production and quality control helped decrease failure rate and customer standards;
• 
  Business managers and executives became interested in continuing quality control programs after the war;
• 
  W.E. Deming and Joseph Juran took quality control to Japan in 1953, and the 1960s saw a surge in the growth of quality in Japan; and
• 
  In the 1980s, the NBC White Paper “If Japan Can…Why Can’t We?” spurred an increased interest in quality and total quality management.

Six Sigma actually began at Motorola in the mid-1980s. Motorola discovered that products with high first-pass yield (the amount of product that made it through defect free) seldom failed in use. They focused on creating strategies to reduce defects in all of their products. By adopting and applying the Malcolm Baldrige criteria, Motorola won this prestigious national quality award in 1988. Motorola joined forces with companies such as IBM, ABB (Asea, Brown, Boveri), Texas Instruments, AlliedSignal and Kodak to found “Six Sigma Research Institute.”
In the late 1990s, GE Capital CEO Jack Welch successfully led the application of Six Sigma techniques to a non-manufacturing environment. The methodology remains popular partly due to the publicity regarding Jack Welch’s commitment to, and success with, achieving Six Sigma capability.