Consumer Driven Six Sigma at Ford

The journey towards Six Sigma quality at Ford began in late 1999, when Phong Vu (Vu), Director of Quality for Global Truck Business was looking for innovative approaches to improve the quality of Ford's vehicles. The answer was Six Sigma, a data driven statistical technique, invented by Motorola in the 1980s and implemented by companies like General Electric (Refer Exhibit I for a concept note on Six Sigma). Vu conducted research on leading companies which had implemented Six Sigma to develop an understanding of its implementation process and its benefits. Vu then suggested to Ford's management that the Six Sigma quality improvement program be taken up.

Ford found that in the manufacture of a car, there existed about 20,000 opportunities for defects. Through Six Sigma, the company aimed at reducing the defect rate to just one defect for every 14.8 vehicles. Commenting on the motive for launching Six Sigma, Henry Wallace, Chief Financial Officer of Ford said, "We have a very strong desire to improve our level of customer satisfaction and we found we were doing incrementally better and not moving the needle to the extent that we wanted. So we looked for something that would really give us a quantum leap forward."⁶ The implementation of Six Sigma required both on-the-job and off-the-job training of employees.