An 8 year study of Six Sigma projects at Ford showed an average for "successful" projects AFTER improvement, of 220,296.4 dpm. Yes, that is about 1 in 4 defective AFTER improvement. What's not to love!
Ford's observed 220,296.4 dpm is 65,000 TIMES HIGHER than the 3.4 dpm claimed by the Six Sigma Scam creator, Mikel Harry, in his sales hype.
It is hardly surprising that Quality is a disaster zone at Ford. Recently, a Ford engineer remarked on LinkedIn "We have observed the 1.5 sigma shift in all our processes". Six Sigma is based on the claim by its creator, that all processes shift by 1.5 sigma, every 50 measurements. This forms the 'six sigma' of Six Sigma and its laughable "metric" of 3.4 dpm. It implies that all processes are wildly out of control. Harry based this rubbish on the height of a stack of discs! He called it "Benderizing", to befuddle his victims.
The consequences of Ford's belief in Six Sigma's nonsense are catastrophic. People at Ford EXPECT to see processes that are wildly out of control, with the 1.5 sigma shift in the mean. Out of control processes may produce ANY level of defects, no matter where specification limits are set, as Ford's 220,296.4 dpm demonstrates.
About a quarter of Ford's Six Sigma projects were deemed FAILURES ... at an average cost of $9,066,000 pa. If 220,296 dpm is a "success" one shudders to think what failure must mean at Ford.
In one so called "mega project", a team of Six Sigma "experts" took 9 months at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a full DMAIC project, to examine why car side stickers didn't stick. Their "breakthrough" project was revealing. It showed that if they had involved the front line workers, as Toyota does, they might have had a response like this: "If ya gave us freakin' time to clean the freakin' muck off the side, the things might stick".
Other individual examples include the Detroit News's account of quality problems with the new Ford Edge, despite Ford Motor Co. having trained over 10,000 Six Sigma Black Belts and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the trash. Quality problems caused Ford to recruit quality expert Kathi Hanley away from Toyota Motor Corp. Hanley pored over the Edge and found more than 70 significant issues and hundreds of minor concerns.
Despite Professor Deming turning Ford around in 1982 from their multi-billion dollar losses, by the late 1980's Ford had again fallen behind in Quality. Ford realized they trailed the Quality thinking of Mazda and the Japanese, in the famous Ford transmission study. The Six Sigma Scam continues to advance Ford further backwards.
Currently, Ford is losing $2,800,000,000 per quarter.
Dr Wheeler sums it up in his statement: 'Any Six Sigma DMAIC success is "a commentary on how completely disorganized everyone was to begin with"'. The mind boggles at the shambles that must exist at Ford, when DMAIC "successes" run at 220,296 dpm.
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)