It is stunning to think of it now, but there was a time – just over twenty years ago in fact – when Motorola was a company down on its luck which could have been finished off by a financial recession at any time. These days it is one of the most prominent cell phone brands in the world.

That Motorola is even around today to have such a market share is quite amazing, and it is all down to Six Sigma training enabling the business to save millions and put quality products in the hands of consumers worldwide. With the early part of the 21st Century seeing a huge rise in cell phone sales, Motorola is now thriving very well, and yet it could have been dead and gone before the cell phone boom.

Motorola did not go out and bring in a team of outside management and training consultants. No, what they did was nothing less than develop a new way of training staff and of manufacturing their products, a method which saw their profits rise and had such profound effects on the success of the company that everyone else wanted to know how they had managed it. The secret was Six Sigma.

Not only has the process saved Motorola a total of $17 billion in the years between 1986 and 2008, but Six Sigma is also a registered trade mark of Motorola, allowing it to profit every time someone sells their own Six Sigma training program. Motorola’s own University is one of the many places to deliver said training.

The idea at the very start was to put together a manufacturing program that eliminated defects, and there is no doubt that it has done that. But it has gone further, being adapted to work in other areas beyond the manufacturing sector. It sounds like simple common sense now, of course, but just to hit on the principles of stability, rigorous analysis and commitment at all levels of the process and to recognize the value of driving these points home made a profound difference at Motorola – so profound that these days, two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies use the Six Sigma process.

It was nothing too complicated, but what has now become known as Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma has been nothing less than revolutionary in the chase for efficiency in business. They may not have known it would get so big when they developed it, but Bill Smith, Jack Welch and all the other early adopters of Six Sigma were pioneers of a system to which probably more than one company owes their continued existence.