Welcome to Six Sigma Black Belt, Course 1, Module 1, Fundamentals of Lean and

Six Sigma. Module 1, Lesson 2,

The Origins of Lean and Six Sigma. Lean and Six Sigma,
as we know them today, represent the best practices currently known to the field
of quality and process improvement. This lesson will explain the origins
of Lean and Six Sigma, and trace the revolution
from the 1700s to today. Until the Industrial Revolution
in the 1700s, products were created
by skilled tradesmen. And the quality of their work
was insured through a rigid and lengthy process of guilds,
apprenticeships and training. After the Industrial Revolution, inspection was used
to decide whether
workers output was acceptable. But because it was not
done in a systematic way, inspection only worked well
with low production volumes. As organizations grew, so did the need for
more effective operations. In 1795, German mathematician, CF Gauss, identified the
normal curve while trying
to develop a predictive model for defects. The normal curve is one of the most
powerful statistical tools used today and it's the foundation for
tools like statistical process control. In 1911, Frederick Taylor introduced
scientific management, which improved production quality by optimizing
the way that tasks were performed and simplifying the jobs. So that workers could
be trained to
perform their specialized sequence of motions in the one best way. In 1913, Henry
Ford took
the idea of the assembly line and improved upon it by adding moving
platforms and a conveyor system. He also recognized that the longer
a car remained in production, the more it cost to produce. So he was the first
person to use
the Lean concepts of waste and time reduction to reduce costs. In the early 1900s,
Walter Shewhart, an
engineer for the Western Electric Company, recognized the impact of
variation on product quality and developed statistical process control,
or SPC. To monitor process variation and
identify when it became excessive and required attention. SPC remains one of the
most important and powerful statistical tools
used by Six Sigma today. Acceptance sampling systems
such as Mill-STD-105 and the Dodge-Romig Plan were introduced
in the 1940s to provide a statistically sound approach to inspection. These systems
and statistical
process control played an important role in guaranteeing
the quality of ammunition and other critical products used by
the US military during World War II. After World War II, quality experts,
W Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran were instrumental
in helping Japan. Raise the quality of its manufactured
products to world class performance levels in just a few years. By teaching them
statistical process
control and their methodologies for continuous process improvement. Both Deming and
Juran, were viewed by Japan as key to their
recovery after World War II, and both were awarded the highest of
honors by the Japanese government. Later in the mid 1950s, Japanese
engineers and business leaders such as Sakichi Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyota,
Taiichi Ohno, and Shigeo Shingo. Built upon the works of people like
Deming, Juran, Taylor, and Ford. And began to develop concepts such as
waste reduction, Kanban, one-piece flow, single-minute exchange of die or
SMED, just-in-time, and kaizen. The Toyota Production System, or TPS, which was
Toyota's approach to creating
efficient manufacturing processes. Was developed from these concepts and
is the basis for what we call lean manufacturing today. Also in the 1950s, Kiuru
Ishikawa introduced his theory
of company wide quality that involved everyone from top management to
the workforce in quality control. Armand Fagan Bomb later became the first
person to use the term total quality when he presented at the first International
Conference on Quality Control in Tokyo in 1969. Ishikawa and Fagan Bomb's ideas
built upon the work of Deming and Juran to form the foundation for
Total Quality Management, or TQM. Which was the most commonly
used approach to quality and process improvement in the US through
the 1980s and into the 1990s. TQM advocated concepts such as
customer focus, employee involvement, continuous process improvement,
statistical analysis of data. And the integration of quality management
throughout the entire organization. Six Sigma originated at a Motorola
television factory in Schaumburg, Illinois, in the mid 1980s. A Japanese firm had
taken
over the factory and made major changes to the production
processes that reduced the plants defect rate to one 20th of what
it had been previously. When Bob Galvin became
Motorola CEO in 1981, he challenged his company
to learn from this and achieve a tenfold improvement in
performance over the next five years. In 1985, a Motorola engineer named
Bill Smith wrote an internal quality paper demonstrating the relationship between
the products performance in the field. And the amount of rework that had been
done on it during the production process. As a result, Motorola management
tasked Bill Smith and a recent hire named Michael Harry with finding
practical ways to eliminate defects. Together, Smith and
Harry developed therefore, stage problem solving process of Measure,
Analyze, Improved and Control, or MAIC which would
later become the DMAIC model. In 1988 grad student John Krafcik
introduced the term lean production in his Sloan Management Review article titled
Triumph of the Lean Production System. Which he wrote while working for
MIT Professor, James Womack. The term lean was later to
find more fully by Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Reuss and their
book about the Toyota production system called The Machine That Changed the World.
Also in 1988, Michael Harry introduced
martial arts terminology to Six Sigma to describe the level of skill a person has
achieved with the Six Sigma methodology. In ,Motorola CEO Bob Galvin tasked
Harry was spreading Six Sigma throughout the company and from then on, Six Sigma
was no longer a tool
used solely by engineers. News of the tremendous financial savings
being obtained by Motorola quickly spread, and other companies soon began
to copy Motorola's approach. In 1993,
Michael Harry moved to Allied Signal and convinced CEO Lawrence Bossidy
to adopt Six Sigma. At AlliedSignal, Harry further refined
Six Sigma to include a system of leadership and
support systems built around the statistical problem solving tools
primarily used up to that point. Shortly afterwards, Jack Welch,
then chairman and CEO of General Electric, became interested in Six Sigma after
learning about its potential for significant cost savings. Six Sigma was so
successful at G.E that by October of 1995, G.E changed its incentive plan for
the entire company. So that 60% of bonuses were tied to
financials and 40% to Six Sigma results. In addition, Six Sigma training became
mandatory for advancement of GE. And by the end of 1998,
no one would be considered for a management job without
at least a greenbelt. Over the years, as companies continued
to find value in both the Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. These two concepts
began to merge
into one comprehensive methodology, often referred to today as Lean Six Sigma
or sometimes just Lean Sigma. We also continue to see the use of
Lean Six Sigma spread beyond manufacturing into health care, education, banking,
retail, logistics, hospitality. And even the government and
military Lean Six Sigma is tools and methodologies have been perfected
by constant use over many decades. And are used successfully by
countless organizations and all types of industries
across the world today? With this, the demand for people who can
effectively utilize Six Sigma to improve their organization's
performance continues to grow. In the next lesson, we will discuss
the benefits of Lean and Six Sigma. Which will help explain why Six Sigma
continues to be such a widely utilized approach to business
performance improvement. After over 30 years of continued use and
growth throughout the world.