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What is Six Sigma?

THE EVOLUTION OF QUALITY AT MOTOROLA

Quality is the foundation of how we do business at Motorola. The key to sustaining continuous, profitable growth is anchored in Flawless Quality in everything we do. We can never become complacent and believe we are doing well enough. In fact, we have developed a mature culture where all of our employees have a healthy continuous dissatisfaction with their performance and continue to strive to achieve greater levels of quality results.

With respect to our long term strategic Quality plan; ultimately it is “to have nothing to do”. So what does that really mean? As we continue to raise the bar and increase the level of quality maturity throughout the business, we concentrate on every associate ultimately achieving flawless quality until it is no longer an extraordinary effort rather second nature inherent in our day to day business practices.

Putting the responsibility of quality into the hands of every employee has clearly made quality the fibre of the entire organization and the foundation of doing business. The end result is the ability to have a dedicated "Quality Organization” that is focused on a strategic direction around customer advocacy, continuous improvement leveraging Six Sigma as the improvement suite of tools and a quality management system, while continuing to achieve higher levels of quality performance and results with less tactical "fire-fighting". To get there, we have had to step back and significantly alter the way we approached quality and organizational development around quality.

Upon initial examination we identified that we had nearly 30 different quality initiatives over the years. Our quality culture started off with an “initiative approach”. Every initiative had a team or a department supporting it with much activity. The downside to this approach was longer term we derived limited value because there was so much focus on the initiatives’ and the activities surrounding them that many times we lost the benefit of what was to be the end result. We then evolved to a “teaming approach” where we leveraged a healthy competitive spirit to drive improvements and increase quality. However, this approach evolved to the focus becoming more about the competition than the outcome that the improvement project was initially intended to deliver. Even with these challenges, these steps did continue to raise our quality competency level leading us to where we are today; a strategic top down, business aligned approach to bottom line results and flawless quality all anchored in Six Sigma methodologies. Six Sigma and a focused alignment resulted in a reduction of those initial 30 quality initiatives by 50% once we aligned to a strategic quality road map.

Our commitment to quality is a tradition that never changes it actually defines the company. Customers often associate us with our Digital Six Sigma efforts that were initially defined and implemented by Motorola in the 1980’s. They see it as our legacy, part DNA and the depth of competency and commitment by our employees. Quality is one of our strongest competencies that will not change. Many customers look at us as the benchmark for quality throughout all the industries we serve. Motorola has become synonymous with Six Sigma and in the recent few years has completely redefined our use of Six Sigma not only for manufacturing excellence but also in our pursuit of excellence in our business transactional functions as well. This continuous renewal of our quality focus is the ongoing validation to our customers and partners that we are committed to their requirements and committed to being the industry leader in everything we offer.

We relentlessly reinforce our commitment to quality. We always look at what improvements we can bring to our quality strategy and how it will affect our competitiveness and our commitment to our customers.

So what is QUALITY today at Motorola? It comes down several key areas of focus:

Motorola has established a foundation of doing business founded on a Quality Management System. QMS is the systematic way we ensures that we achieve the highest level of quality performance and organizational maturity to continue to delight our customers by consistently delivering products and services our customers have come to expect. Through our QMS, Motorola delivers increased productivity as well as improvements in performance across our products, services; our manufacturing and our effectiveness of key business processes such as product life-cycle management, supply chain efficiencies, and employee teamwork. QMS also assures we can obtain and maintain industry quality certifications through external audits and site visits, ensure operational consistency, and drive continual cycles of improvement.

Motorola has also invested in a Quality IQ program in order to raise every employee’s level of quality understanding, competency and maturity. This program offers numerous quality courses at varying degrees of complexity and many geared towards specific job functions. Participation in these courses is yet another way our employees are enhancing their quality tool belts to offer more to our customers and our business.

In the past three years alone, Motorola has realized over $800 million of improvements from Six Sigma projects and has certified over 1,260 Belts (Master/Black/Green). Six Sigma implementation has extended far beyond traditional deployments. Six Sigma projects are now targeted at “transactional processes” – those related to Sales, Marketing, Service and Finance operations. Design for Six Sigma is embedded in hardware and software design processes and the techniques and methodologies are becoming increasingly embedded in our services businesses as well.

By focusing on customer requirements leveraging Six Sigma and a solid quality management system and continuing to educate the organization on quality tools such as the tools associated with Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma we ultimately reduce the cost of quality enabling additional investment in new customer driven product creation as well as reducing the overall cost of ownership of our solutions to our customers.

One way we are enhancing the acquisition of customer requirements is through a customer focused program called Customer Scorecards. Through the Customer Scorecard program, our businesses receive specific customer requirements directly from them and in turn are evaluated directly by the customers on our performance and relationship management based on the criteria they have define and feel is important—not our internal metrics. A team of Motorolans follows up on these goals by regularly meeting with these customers to understand how we have been performing and to learn how we can continue to improve upon our performance to meet their expectations. This program has dramatically enhanced our relationships with our customers and has established a trust in quality performance and has given employees at all levels a clearer understanding of a direct line of sight to our customers expectations.

In our business we use the term trusted partner. A trusted partner means that we have gone beyond customer satisfaction and delight and have developed a partnership founded in totally fulfilling customer needs for products, services and quality as well as positioning them for successful profitability in their businesses and markets. At Motorola, we have quality metrics with an outside in view across every function in the business that ensures we never lose the responsibility we have to our customers.

All of these strategic elements that we have reviewed up to this point come together to form the quality culture we live by at Motorola; from the quality courses we offer, the way we think, the way we act and the way we work!! We are always working on instilling and strengthening our relationships with our partners through our commitment to quality.

The true test of our level of quality maturity comes when our quality results lead us to not only being better than our previous years with respect to meeting our customer commitments, but better than our competition and better than our customers’ expectations.

To be a great corporation, it is more than just having world class results. We must have a continuous and constructive dissatisfaction with our current performance regardless of how good it is. We must continue to refine and refresh our strategic vision that drives renewing ourselves every day and setting actions that leads us to continue to out perform year after year. Our quality maturity journey is never complete; it is life a long business commitment at Motorola!!