One of the methodologies helping Boeing Commercial Airplanes meet the challenge of change is Six Sigma. Six Sigma aids manufacturers in their quest to design, build and deliver near-perfect products by reducing defects and variation, and improving quality, resulting in substantial cost savings.

Specifically, Six Sigma refers to manufacturing processes that produce a level of quality at 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Most U.S. companies operate at a rate of 66,807 defects per million, or "3.0 Sigma."

"We're committed to following the Lean roadmap we've established  reducing variation and increasing quality and embedding quality into our production system," said Steve Westby, vice president of Manufacturing for Airplane Programs. "The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many defects you have in a process, you can figure out systematically how to eliminate them and get as close to zero defects as possible. Six Sigma is a useful tool to help us find root causes of quality issues."

Since 1999, Boeing Commercial Airplanes has participated in numerous pilot projects using Six Sigma principles. Focusing intently on the customer, this data-driven way to manage variation in manufacturing and managing business processes also is relentlessly focused on business metrics and cultural change. Specially selected experts undergo extensive training and become certified as "green belts" or "black belts" depending on the degree of training and projects completed. Currently there are dozens of projects in work across Commercial Airplanes, with more than 300 trained as green belts and nearly 60 trained as black belts.

Other Fortune 500 companies such as General Electric, IBM and Whirlpool have aggressively adopted Six Sigma methodology and strive to integrate the philosophy as part of their business culture.

For more information on Six Sigma at Boeing, visit http://leo.web.boeing.com on the Boeing intranet.