The principles of Six Sigma can be traced clear back to the 18th century when Carl Fredrick Gauss introduced the normal curve as a concept. The roots of Six Sigma developed here, but that is not where the standard was actually created for product variation. In the 1920s, three sigma was demonstrated by Walter Shewhart. He showed that when you measure three sigma from the mean, that is where correction is required in a process. Of course, the Six Sigma that people know and use today comes from the 1980s and is credited to Bill Smith, an engineer for Motorola. Motorola was looking for a way to improve their defect ratios and their quality control measures, and they wanted to do it in a completely different way than it had been done before.

Enter Six Sigma, where defects could be measured in parts per million, allowing Motorola to improve their bottom line results and their overall production at every level. In the beginning, Motorola actually documented over $16 billion in savings from their Six Sigma implementation. Six Sigma has since been adopted by thousands of different companies. Motorola created many of the original methodologies and cultural changes within the manufacturing workplace to develop the changes that needed to occur, and those are the methodologies that are still followed today.

Six Sigma has influenced much of the business world since it became popular in the 1980s. This process is still in use today, and has made great names out of some company leaders like Larry Bossidy of Honeywell (formerly Allied Signal) and GE's Jack Welch. This process is about more than just a quality management system. TQM and ISO are quality improvement systems, and they are effective in their own right. Six Sigma, however, is a complete business lifestyle, and is more of a philosophy than a simple system.

The Six Sigma Methodology has probably been explored by many in history. As the modern business knows it, however, the credit for developing Six Sigma goes to Motorola. They developed a foundation and a methodology that focuses on generating results of 3.4 parts per million (PPM) as a defect ratio for their manufacturing processes. Today, many companies implement their own Six Sigma methodologies to help improve their defect ratios and quality so that they, too, can boost their bottom line and have a better process and business operation overall.

Six Sigma, as it is known today, is only a few decades old. However, it is a tried and true process improvement philosophy that any business can benefit from if they implement it correctly. Of course, having the right Six Sigma leadership and training is incremental to the success of the program. Any business that has found success with Six Sigma can thank Motorola and Bill Smith for needing a better way to do things. In the future, it's likely that this process will become more involved in just about every business as a standard of operation, simply because it is such a successful methodology to adopt in any business environment.