Thank you to the 880,000 920,000 people who read my post exposing the Six Sigma Scam at Boeing. This is almost double my post comparing the success of Deming and Quality Circles at Toyota, to the Six Sigma disaster at Ford. Toyota has had over 2,000,000 process improvements from its worker teams. Ford's Six Sigma pseudo "expert" teams have produced an average of 220,000 dpmo AFTER "improvement" in "successful" projects.
Six Sigma was sold to ignorant senior managers on the basis of claims of cost cutting. The math was simple. Six Sigma's creator, Mikel Harry, told gullible CEO's that if you gave him a man's half yearly salary, that person would magically cut costs by 20 times his salary a year, every year. Con man Harry claimed that 2000 Six Sigma bunnies would cut $2.8B in costs.
Harry's hype was appealing to simple minded "rank and yank" managers like Jack Welch. Jack relied on sacking 10,000 people every year to make his bottom line. Jack called Harry a madman but Harry's promises of cost cutting were irresistible. Not bothering to investigate, Jack handed Harry $8B.
HOW?How did Harry claim that Six Sigma would cut costs? Harry said NOTHING about "reducing variation" or control charts. Instead, he claimed his magic came from "smoke and mirrors". Incredibly, thousands drank his snake oil.
BOEING SIX SIGMASadly, Boeing's Reliability and Quality Assurance Director boasted that Harry's smoke and mirrors would exclude any chance of defects that might lead to the loss of life or financial costs (Lee, 2018).
COST CUTTING at BOEINGBoeing sacrificed Quality, for cost cutting.
Cost cutting design led to a plane that was a patch up job. The MCAS was intended to compensate for the lack of a first class quality design. The MCAS was supposed to ensure stability of the plane. It depended on an Angle of Attack (AoA) sensor that detected whether the poorly designed plane was pitching up. There were 2 AoA sensors. What could possibly go wrong?
COST CUTTING SENSORSCost cutting resulted in only one sensor being connected. You could get the second sensor to display an "AoA disagree warning" but that was an optional extra! No one was made aware of the 737Max changes and no training was given. How would anyone know about the importance of the AoA. It was a loss of the active AoA sensor in a bird strike that caused the 157 deaths in the Ethiopian crash.
A design that focused on first class Quality rather than cost cutting, would have had 3 ACTIVE sensors in such a critical application. Disagreement of one of the three inputs would allow it to be excluded electronically, and repaired on landing.
If Boeing had put Deming Quality first, $80,000,000,000 and 346 lives would have been saved.
THE LESSONCost cutting is a road to disaster. Focus on Quality and costs will be minimized (Taguchi).
Six Sigma should be eradicated. It is the opposite of Quality and everything Professor Deming taught.
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)