SUPPLIER IMPROVEMENT VIA SPC APPLICATIONS WORKSHOPS

Motorola's pathway towards Six Sigma has been diverse, including management activities, manufacturing, technology, delivery, service and costs. Into the general category of costs falls the quality of piece parts used in final manufacturing. Bringing piece part suppliers up to Six Sigma levels is a challenging task and crucial to Motorola's overall goal of achieving Six Sigma by 1992. Piece part suppliers tend to be small companies with little or not resources for implementing the use of statistical tools into their processing. While a large number of courses in statistical methods are available in the marketplace, these courses do not generally go far enough in terms of implementation. They may provide the attendee with a basic understanding of the ideas and methods, but problems tend to arise when the attendee returns to his home company and begins to try them. Roadblocks and frustration stop many SPC programs at this point. To fill this gap between basic classroom courses and help bring suppliers to a Six Sigma level, the Supply Management Quality Assurance organization developed the concept of SPC Applications Workshops. These workshops combine classroom training with actual hands on applications using the supplier's process as the training materials. This leaves the supplier with an understanding of how to implement the tools for ''his'' process. Each workshop is designed to meet the needs of the supplier as well as to provide Motorola with essential data for evaluating the capability of a supplier to produce product to meet Motorola's need. Each workshop contains several basic elements which are common to all: problem definition, measurement capability studies, multi-vari analysis, process capability analysis, correlation analysis, and the development of data collection and reporting format. This paper discusses the methodology for performing an applications workshop.