At 9 a.m. on a weekday, 20 Northeast Ohio business leaders gather upstairs in a warehouse at Cleveland State University near Chester Avenue and Interstate 90. Like martial artists on their sensei, they concentrate as though training for black belts. Kris Thieker of Sigma Breakthrough Technologies Inc. has been a master black belt since her training at General Electric in 1995. She wields not cement blocks to be chopped in half but laptops, as does each pupil. Her students are pursuing their black belt — in Six Sigma, the art of quality improvement.
Across the street at the Advanced Center for Manufacturing (ACM), a joint program of CAMP Inc. and CSU, Andrew Liou passionately diagrams the history of quality in manufacturing. It seems there's nothing he would rather talk about.
'Cleveland is a hard-core manufacturing town. We must improve our quality journey from quality assurance to quality improvement,' says Liou. 'Right now in this community, people are upgrading to not only assure but improve quality.'
Quality has been the essence of manufacturing since ... forever. Imagine David's slingshot backfiring; Columbus' boat sinking; Armstrong's face shield cracking. Quality may be an abstract term, but its evolution as a science has heightened to a fever pitch. This century alone, says Liou, a 15-year CSU faculty member and ACM director, there have been three distinct periods in the evolution of quality.
The first began around 1920 with the era of quality control. Gauging the quality of manufactured output was in the hands of inspectors at the end of the line. Each piece had specifications, some not so precise. Every output simply had to fall between the upper and lower specification limit — a nut passed muster as long as its hole was in the acceptable range.
The '60s ushered in the second era: quality assurance. Now the customers wanted more than to inspect their delivery. They wanted to see the supplier's raw-materials inputs, process design, method for detecting defects — their quality system, or as Liou says, their infrastructure. Companies took on supplier-certification programs to ensure that they were uniformly purchasing quality products. Ford, for example, began giving Q-1 certifications to its top suppliers.
Still, the process was reactionary, and even though manufacturers began to expect specific levels of quality, such programs became so numerous that they lost their meaning. According to Liou, quality control and assurance are defensive; they fall short by failing to dig into the manufacturing process. 'It would be like getting rid of SAT scores and admitting students to college based on their third-grade teachers,' says Liou. 'Not having any way of gauging improvement along the line — just knowing that the product is acceptable.'
One product of the quality-assurance age that still applies, however, is the standardization of quality-management systems on a national and international level. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), initiated in 1947, aims to certify the ability of companies in 91 participating nations to measure quality. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), ISO's United States member, is comprised of 180 technical committees that specialize in areas of manufacturing from asbestos to zinc.
ANSI regulates independent third-party registrars who certify manufacturing or service firms based on five different standards: ISO 9001 covers design, manufacturing, installation and servicing products, while ISO 9003 covers only final product inspection and testing. Cleveland's Lincoln Electric, for example, earned its ISO 9002 certification (for production and installation) in 1994 by third-party registrar ABS Quality Evaluations. GE Lighting received its ISO 9001 in 1994, also by ABS Quality Evaluations and in 1998 received its QS (Quality System) 9000, which is based on ISO 9001 but carries added requirements geared toward the auto industry and especially suppliers to the Big Three.
Standardization has been an important step in the evolution of manufacturing and is still a building block. But even through the '80s, most manufacturing firms, reliant on the defensive practice of post-production inspection, still talked about defects as a percentage of their output.
As technology improved exponentially in the late '80s, processes became so complex that existing expectations were no longer acceptable. The era of quality improvement was born. Motorola pioneered the new movement in 1987 with its Six Sigma program. Suddenly the mobile-communications giant measured defects per million — as in 3.4 defects per million parts. Technically this figure is derived from Motorola's statistical goal that the spread of the manufacturing process, plus and minus six sigma, is less than the engineering tolerance.
So how does it reduce defects and benefit the company? Six Sigma combines process mapping, analysis of failure modes, design experiments and inferential statistics to proactively improve quality throughout the manufacturing process. It's simple, says Liou. 'Quality is no longer in the form of a policeman, no longer somebody's watchdog. It used to stand alone. Now it's a team member, working with the engineers, and it's part of the profit-generating team.' CAMP Inc., which supports the ACM in conjunction with CSU, says its Six Sigma program is like retraining the entire work force to be 'variation killers.'
Six Sigma training consists of three main steps, says Liou. First and foremost: 'Be robust toward variations in the process. It's identifying materials and processes and critical input variables, and selecting a team who understands these variables.'
This itself is a five-part process (define, measure, analyze, improve and control) called the Six Sigma Road Map. To illustrate, Liou draws a graph with a mound-shaped line that represents manufacturing with a wide range of specification variance in the output. Then he draws a spiked line up through the middle of the mound, depicting an efficient output with almost no variation. 'If I change this,' Liou speculates, 'can I get this?'
'The natural tendency is to think about practical solutions to problems right away,' he continues, leading into step two, the statistical techniques that are the backbone of Six Sigma. 'You need to have the discipline to look at statistical problems and solutions to reach the practical solution and get the data to support you.'
Step three is the bottom line, the financial impact. How much are the defects costing? How much does it cost to improve the processes and prevent the defects? The difference is the impact of Six Sigma.
It's been more than 12 years since Motorola launched Six Sigma. In the '90s, quality improvement caught on with other giants such as GE and Allied Signal. Liou says that when Ford decided to train thousands of employees not long ago, the trend spread to local powers such as Avery Dennison, Eaton and Rockwell International. 'A lot of companies are excited about cutting costs by improving quality,' he says, noting that the last two years saw increased participation from the smaller and midsized enterprises that Liou's ACM targets — a shift toward the little men who stand alone or supply the big men.
ACM and CAMP opened their Six Sigma program in January 2000. CAMP's partner, Sigma Breakthrough Technologies, signed on to provide instructors such as Thieker to train the black belts in four-week courses. Black belts focus on the Six Sigma Road Map; a work-related project is required for graduation. CAMP's Six Sigma program also offers leadership training for CEOs and senior executives; champion training for managers of prospective black belts; and green-belt training, a condensed course similar to black-belt training without the emphasis on cross utilization.
Lincoln Electric jumped into Six Sigma last February, says Paul Fantelli, the company's vice president of quality and reliability. 'It will take years to deploy,' he says. 'We're still in the beginning. But we saw it as an opportunity to improve processes across the entire organization.' Lincoln Electric trained 11 black belts and 11 champions in the first six months and sent 40 managers through leadership training. Since then, hundreds more employees have participated, and Sigma Breakthrough Technologies now trains Lincoln Electric on site.
Another Six Sigma advocate is GE Lighting. Not long ago, says Rebecca Bompiedi, GE Lighting's general manager of Global Six Sigma, GE used traditional end-of-the-line inspection. Now it looks at long-term control and shoots for 3.4 defects per million. 'Imagine a high-speed production line that once operated at 85 percent efficiency,' says Bompiedi. 'Now we identify and eliminate root problems and crank it up to 90 percent.' For a company that ships billions of commodities like light bulbs each year, a slight improvement even in shipping damages can greatly impact the bottom line.
Bompiedi herself is a one-time protigi of CSU's Liou. Since earning her black belt at GE and moving into a leadership position, she has come full circle. As she recruits managers and potential leaders, she looks for those worthy of Six Sigma training — or better yet, current black belts. 'It's a huge trend. It can be a big savings for the company.'
While Six Sigma works for many, it certainly isn't the only approach to quality assurance. Take, for instance, total quality management. TQM requires behavioral and cultural change and integrates everything from human-resources and organizational management to production to customer service. The catch, according to Liou: TQM does not measure gains and evaluate individual performance. Says Bompiedi, who previously worked for a TQM-based organization, 'The problem was that companies were employing quality programs before stabilizing the production process itself.' Six Sigma operates on a smaller scale more conducive to measuring individual performance.
'The Six Sigma methodology is very project oriented — not just learning a general concept to affect attitudes and quality,' says Fantelli. '[It involves] gaining tools that can be applied very practically. It starts in training with the project. When you're done, you've already solved something.'
Then why doesn't everyone practice it? According to a George S. May International survey, 72 percent of small and medium-sized businesses today have no formal quality program. U.S. corporations spend $30 billion a year on training and education, but much of that is gobbled up by big players such as Motorola, which funded Motorola University with $120 million.
Bompiedi attributes $300,000 in yearly savings per manufacturing black belt and $1,000,000 in the commercial arena — figures so concrete that GE builds its operating plans around them. It's well-known among Six Sigma advocates that Jack Welch sunk $500 million into GE's Six Sigma launch in 1998 but reaped $2 billion in savings in 1999 alone. In general, Six Sigma companies can expect a dollar of savings per dollar spent on training initially and a two-for-one payback within two years.
So the 21st century commences as a time for quality improvement. But there's always going to be room for good old end-of-the-line quality assurance ... right? Not if Six Sigma can help it. 'We're at about 200 to 1,000 defects per million right now,' says GE's Bompiedi. 'If we can get to 3.4 per million, we don't need inspection.'