Six Sigma and the university: Teaching, research, and meso-analysis

Six Sigma was introduced by industry practitioners and consultants as a means to improve any given company's competitive position. Its acceptance by industry has been widespread over the past two decades, yet academic research on Six Sigma has been surprisingly limited. Further, most of the research has been focused on the tools and statistical techniques used in Six Sigma. Its relationship with university activities including teaching, research, and service is not clear. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore selected aspects of the relationship between Six Sigma and universities more fully. In doing so, there is an attempt to answer these fundamental questions: (i) What is Six Sigma? (ii) What roles can academics usefully play in relation to Six Sigma? and (iii) How can academia help companies to better use the new project related data sources created by Six Sigma. Results here divide into three chapters. First, the literature on Six Sigma is reviewed and synthesized. This includes detailed descriptions of research trends with an emphasis on establishing its relationship to quality management theory and topics for future research. Secondly, case base training is examined as a method to improve Six Sigma education and increase usage on the job among university student learners. Third, with Six Sigma's emphasis on management by data and project based data collection, industry is starting to accumulate many large databases of "meta-data" concerning the successes or failures of individual quality improvement projects. We propose methods specifically for making use of the project data and illustrate their application using 39 case studies form a mid-western manufacturing firm.