Motorola and the Goal Of Six Sigma -- In Search of Quality Training Video

[Music] Motorola has always been a high technology company for over 60 years the company has competed by offering cutting edge products that are rugged and highly reliable by the 1970s every business that Motorola was engaged in Communications semiconductors consumer electronics was targeted by the Japanese if the company were to survive as a global competitor the way it did business would have to change radically today Motorola's sales are almost 11 billion worldwide the company has cracked the tough Japanese Market with cellular phones pagers and semiconductors the foundation of their success is no secret Motorola competes with

Superior technological innovation and most importantly [Music] quality Total Quality it's crucial do it right in your organization should do well ignore it or mismanage it then you're in trouble in the early ' 80s Motorola said we're going to improve Total Quality tenfold in 5 years that sounded crazy most thought Motorola was already pretty good but by 1985 people all over Motorola had started with wherever they were Define their own measures and improve tfold then the real blow managers went to Japan to study best-in-class companies they found that the best Japanese companies were still as much

as 2,000 times better that's when Motorola Executives got really outrageous they said will improve another 10 times in two years 100 fold in four years and Achieve what they call Six Sigma the year after that one caution in hindsight the process looks reasonably straightforward but the folks at Motorola are the first to say they did a lot of muddling around a certain amount of muddling seems to accompany any change effort as big as Total Quality motor oil is good example in training materials like this should shortcut some of the seemingly inefficient muddling but you have

to expect it after all total quality is cultural change and your culture is not motorolas you have to model to find out what works for you don't let your drive to be lean and mean drive out this necessary part of the change process so top management is getting committed setting goals and muddling what's the rest of the organization doing as we'll learn from Motorola they're adopting Total Quality one person at a time here's how it works divide the organization into a host of small teams give the teams the Big Goal then let them find out

their own ways to measure and meet that goal the team starts by talking to its customers those external or internal people on the receiving end of whatever the team does for a living they find out in customer terms first what quality means second how to improve what they do and Third how to measure that Improvement then the team analyzes the way they now do work work and the way it ought to be done to meet the newly defined customer targets they tell management what has to be done and what it will take to get there

they own the process cost savings and new ideas begin to flourish almost day one the rest is simple but not so easy execution year in and year out the process is repeated continuous Improvement ensues and to people down the line it's exciting they're empowered and they're in control and like ball teams who execute well they start seeing a lot more wins Top management has to be Visionary as Motorola was to make the process work as we'll see Motorola made big savings through its Total Quality program but could they have predicted success ahead of time no

way Motorola suspended disbelief and committed a huge investment in quality because they believed that was the key to their longstanding goal total customer satisfaction [Music] Motorola world's largest exclusive electronic manufacturer present the Motorola TV hour in the late 40s early 50s a pushman by TV set they would take it home they would plug it in and it would it would often fail and so we became on a first time basis with our dealer and or our repair man this was early life failure or Laten defects uh this condition was very normal in fact the electronic

industry has for years and as long as I've been in involved in the industry and it's my whole life has assumed that it was normal to have early life failures and this is a customer satisfaction issue now if you buy a product and it fails even though it's been repaired it still put a bad taste in your mouth you're dis satisfied was quazar to counter industrywide customer dissatisfaction Motorola introduced their innovative quazar line in the late 60s and early 7s receiver it has set a new standard for Reliable performance and instatic tuning helped keep the

color constant even when you change from channel to channel to channel hi Steve oh hi hi Jane and it's backed up with Motorola's experience in tubeless solid state modules that plug into the works in the drawer TV for ease of service get the picture get quazar by Motorola quazar by Motorola but people didn't want televisions that were easy to repair they wanted televisions they didn't have to repair at all now the Japanese they took our designs from the mid-50s we gave them to them we licensed our technology they took our designs and they worked on

their products and worked on the processes and they eliminated the issue of early life failure consequently when you bought a TV set after there was no longer a US industry they buy one and take it home it works plays for literally forever okay and consequently that's a customer satisfaction issue that brings about uh confidence in terms of market and sales uh in fact my personal view is that if we had not considered this issue of early life failures as being normal and it had done something to work on the on the the design quality and

the process quality and had eliminated the lat and defects we would still be uh in business in the United States today with a television or consumer electronics Industry that that that business would still be in existence the message wasn't lost on Motorola a company that historically all always had a quality Focus from its earliest products an Innovative car radio in the 20s Police radios in the 30s the handy talkie during World War II and semiconductors in the ' 50s Motorola's Hallmark was ruggedness and reliability with no help from the US government watching American industry yield

any Market to the Japanese was particularly ging for a company like Motorola which prided itself on quality we're often asked how we got started on this journey for quality improvement and it really goes back to 1979 we were in an officer meeting in a hotel down in downtown Chicago in the spring sometime in the spring and we were in a meeting that started on Thursday and it was going through Sunday noon and we were halfway through this meeting when our chairman Bob Galvin asked the group are there any second opinions or critiques on the progress

of the meeting to date one young man got up who was the national sales manager for the communications sector this was our biggest business unit within the corporation and he said uh to Bob you know it's a great meeting we're making good progress in the agenda but the genda is all wrong he says I don't know what you folks are reading but my custo my salese tell me that their customers are telling them that our quality stinks okay now this uh literally caused an uproar or a riot among this meeting because uh all of us

who were in either in the factories or the product divisions were convinced that this fellow was all wrong I was glad glad that he was so candid and I felt that that was a uh an enlightening statement it was obviously disappointing to hear our sales manager of the best product line we had highest market share and greatest profits uh obliged to say that but he's certainly turned us on what is the Catalyst for Motorola's extraordinary push toward Total Quality their aggressive quality goal of Six Sigma Six Sigma is a statistical term defining standard deviations from

a mean in a bell-shaped curve one Sigma translates into a defect rate of about 32% two Sigma is 96% perfect and 3 is 99.7% Motorola's goal for 1992 is Six Sigma 3.4 defects per million opportunities near perfection each of our uh businesses and all departments have accepted one fundamental standard of measurement of defects under the rubric of this Six Sigma quality program that is a central core we can compare dissimilar functions all over the company by measuring their Sigma ratings and have a very accurate relative measurement of how we're doing so everybody uses the same

metrics the same measuring system they come at the learnability of that slightly at variance uh they have options as to how they will train two degrees but fundamentally we're all moving to the same beat throughout Motorola's over 60-year history quality has been at the Forefront and in my estimation the real test of leaders and measurable test I believe ultimately is to test the degree to which the credentialed people of the company not just the chief executive officer have anticipated all the needs of their customers in their relevant field and have committed to it better than

any competitor what does Gavin really mean by anticipate and commit two things first he's telling us Motorola had to do that to get Total Quality off the ground but second he's saying that virtual Perfection is not that far away at least for standard activities like manufacturing and accounting he's saying let's assume that what will our next big challenge be concurrently he's asking where have we and other companies always messed up in the past managements are too slow to see big changes coming and too reluctant to invest heavily in them Motorola is way ahead of most

companies in the US and many of its Japanese competitors and it's probably possible to be better than Six Sigma but that's not going to give them continuing competitive Advantage so what's beyond quality you need to be able to anticipate big changes early on changes in technology changes in the industry the customer the world it's not forecasting it's being better at making sense of what's already going on Motorola did that with semiconductors they did that with Total Quality they're doing it with short cycle Management systems but here's the r our traditional measures of financial performance typically

get us off track what happens is you see things like semiconductors and Total Quality coming then you run a rigorous cash flow analysis on them when they're in the emerging stages they don't look that profitable so people are afraid to commit they might be wrong and