Six Sigma was developed within Motorola to compete with the Kaizen (or lean manufacturing) business model in Japan. As a result of Six Sigma, Motorola received the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in the year 1988. In the 1990s, Allied Signal hired Larry Bossidy and introduced Six Sigma in heavy manufacturing. A few years later, General Electric's Jack Welch consulted Bossidy and began Six Sigma at General Electric. At this point, Six Sigma became more widely accepted and known in the manufacturing world. During the 2000s, Lean Six Sigma forked from Six Sigma and became its own unique process. While Lean Six Sigma developed as a specific process of Six Sigma, it also incorporates ideas from lean manufacturing, which was developed as a part of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s. The first concept of Lean Six Sigma was created in 2001 by the book titled Leaning into Six Sigma: The Path to Integration of Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma by Barbara Wheat, Chuck Mills, Mike Carnell. The book was developed as a guide for managers of manufacturing plants on how to combine lean manufacturing and Six Sigma in order to dramatically improve quality and cycle time in the plant. Wheat, Mills, and Carnell narrate the story of a company that was skeptical about implementing Lean Six Sigma Certification, but as a result of doing so, was able to successfully improve the quality and efficiency in all aspects of the business. In the early 2000s, Six Sigma principles expanded into other sectors of the economy, such as Healthcare, Finance, Supply Chain, etc. While different sectors of the economy sell different "products" and have different "customers," Lean Six Sigma principles can still be applied with slight alterations in wording and processes. After roughly 30 years (1979–2009), Six Sigma-DMAIC, when examined as a structured, scientific-based, problem-solving methodology (and its record of providing tangible, bottom-line benefits), stands up to the test of time. It has, however, not lived up to the remainder of its wide claims as a stand-alone program for strategy, change management, leadership development, and as a quality and continuous improvement strategy, these weaknesses primarily being traced to Six Sigma's minimal/poor consideration of the human, behavioral, and team-participative aspects of creating and driving sustainable change. Six Sigma, at its core, is a system for eliminating defects in manufacturing. The name refers to a statistical model, based on deviations on a bell curve, that dictates the number of acceptable defects per million manufacturing steps. Achieving Six Sigma means an organization tolerates just 3.4 defects per million steps, insisting that 99.99966% of its products or services are without flaws. Historically, most industrial companies operate between three and four Sigma, making them between 93% and 99.3% defect-free (these figures can vary slightly depending on the statistical model).GE adopted Six Sigma from Motorola in 1995, and under Welch, it became corporate religion. The company invested more than $1 billion in training thousands of employees, and the system was adopted by every GE business unit. Tools designed to streamline the making of widgets were adopted for every company process, from accounting to customer service to hire. But as GE began a long, slow decline, so did the popularity of Six Sigma. Once synonymous with management excellence, GE's reputation in the business world plummeted in concert with its share price. The business press, once effusive in its praise, began asking, "What the hell happened at GE?" In the latest blow, accounting expert Harry Markopolos, who tried to warn the world about Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, has accused GE of disguising the depths of its problems. (The company, in turn, accuses Markopolos of working for short-sellers who would profit from its decline.) The main reasons for the failure are-1. Lack of management support.2. Incorrect strategy deployment3. Incorrect project4. Inappropriate processing5. Inappropriate team members6.Lack of process owner's support7. Incorrect scopes8. Incorrect training9. Incorrect measurement system10. Incorrect Implementation Lean Six Sigma projects can lead to a rewarding experience and immense benefits for an organization; however, not all of them achieve the expected results. A Bain & Company survey in 2008 found that 80 percent of 184 companies responding claimed that "Lean Six Sigma efforts are failing to drive the anticipated value," and 74 percent said, "they are not gaining the expected competitive edge because they haven't achieved their saving targets."
