DuPont sold its textile business and adopted the Six Sigma movement to transform itself into a multidisciplinary science company. The Six Sigma movement was a key tool that enabled DuPont to succeed in new areas through quality improvement and management innovation. DuPont has made great strides in the agriculture and food sectors and has established itself as a company that practices sustainability and social responsibility.
The synthetic fiber nylon is all too familiar to South Korean engineering students studying chemistry. Considered one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, nylon was created by the DuPont Company in the United States in 1938. DuPont has been deeply engraved in the minds of engineering students along with nylon as the world’s leading textile company, which has become one of the most popular clothing brands based on the success of nylon. But will the next generation of engineering students remember DuPont as a textile company like we do? The chances of that happening were cut short when DuPont sold its textiles business in 2004. The sale of a company’s flagship business, which had driven it for nearly 100 years, seemed to herald the end of the DuPont empire, but the reality tells a different story. Since the sale of the textile business, DuPont has been rebranding itself as a leading agricultural and food company. The transformation, which Wall Street called “the biggest gamble in DuPont’s 200-year history,” was driven by the Six Sigma movement.
The Six Sigma movement is a quality improvement movement that aims to “produce an average of only 3.4 defective products out of every million products.” Sigma (σ, sigma) is a statistical term that refers to the standard deviation of how far each piece of data is from the mean, and the smaller the sigma of a statistic, the more data that is close to the mean. However, the meaning of sigma in the Six Sigma movement doesn’t exactly match the definition as a statistical term. This is because the Six Sigma movement has expanded beyond just quality improvement in manufacturing to include non-manufacturing industries such as finance and services, as well as management techniques that affect all aspects of a company’s work system. In the current Six Sigma movement, sigma stands for “sigma level,” which is defined as “target range/standard deviation,” a slight variation on the statistical meaning of sigma. According to this definition, the Six Sigma movement is “a management activity that improves work to a level where the standard deviation falls between the upper and lower limits of the normal distribution (target range) with six standard deviations on the left and right sides.” (Six Sigma is recognized as the lowest level of error that can be realized in actual work.) The reason why the degree of quality management is represented by sigma is that the targets and specifications that vary depending on the product and process can be unified and used as a single standard to indicate the quality level. This definition is not only useful for comparing the quality levels of different processes, but also provides an objective measure of quality improvement.
The Six Sigma movement, founded by Dr. Michael Harry in 1987, was initially a response to the Japanese QC (Quality Control) that dominated the global manufacturing market in the 80s. While conventional QC is a producer-oriented, manufacturing-oriented management technique that is concerned with partial optimization of the parts or points where errors occurred, Six Sigma is differentiated from the previous one in that it fixes and refines the entire business process from the perspective of the customer. In other words, it quantifies all elements of corporate activities, not only manufacturing but also product development and sales, and binds the margin of error of factors that have a decisive impact on quality within Six Sigma through constant feedback. Just as QC emerged from the manufacturing field, evolved into TQC (Total Quality Control) and TQM (Total Quality Management), and was applied to sectors other than manufacturing, the Six Sigma movement has evolved into an all-round management innovation movement through continuous research and improvement. As a result, Six Sigma has become a management technique that can be applied to companies other than Motorola and has contributed significantly to the improvement of product quality and service at its adopters. Texas Instruments adopted the Six Sigma movement in 1992, and it gradually spread to GE, IBM, Sony, and others, until DuPont adopted it in 1999.
DuPont utilized Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) as part of the same corporate “personality makeover” mentioned above. DFSS is an aspect of the Six Sigma movement that has been praised for its ability to effectively incorporate customer input into product development, and is well aligned with the 21st century marketplace, where customer needs have emerged as a key factor in creating value for companies. As DuPont reduces its share of the textile industry and increases its share of the food industry, the company has implemented DFSS into its new work organization and new product development process, successfully developing more than 500 new products a year. The investment paid off in 2007, with DuPont’s agriculture and food sales reaching $6.8 billion (compared to $6.6 billion in its traditional focus on performance materials) and new products developed within five years accounting for 34% of the company’s total sales. The Six Sigma movement and the quantification of work systems and product processes were the cornerstones that enabled DuPont to build a new home as a multidisciplinary science company, even in the midst of a cataclysmic 180-degree shift in its business portfolio.
DuPont’s transformation was made possible by a bold decision by the leadership team and a larger management frame called Six Sigma. In economics, it is said that the Business 1.0 era, with its core values of “division of labor and standards,” has been replaced by the Business 2.0 era of “progress and innovation,” led by changes in management techniques such as Six Sigma. In addition, DuPont’s creative acceptance of Six Sigma, which has expanded the scope of Six Sigma utilization from improving the quality of existing product lines to improving the entire company’s constitution, is a clear example of how Six Sigma can serve as a bridge beyond the Business 2.0 era to the Business 3.0 era of ‘creation and revolution’. Just as capitalism is the economic ideology that represents modernity today, Six Sigma will be the icon of innovation in the early 21st century. Our sons and daughters may not recognize DuPont as a textile company, but they will remember DuPont from their economics books as an example of a company that successfully innovated through Six Sigma.
Moreover, DuPont’s adoption and success with Six Sigma is more than just quality improvement. It fundamentally transforms a company’s organizational culture and management philosophy and helps employees develop a goal-oriented mindset. DuPont’s leadership actively educated employees on Six Sigma principles and created an environment where they could practice them. As a result, employees have developed the ability to systematically analyze and solve problems, which has contributed to the company’s overall competitiveness. Six Sigma has also played an important role in DuPont’s sustainability goals. DuPont applied the Six Sigma methodology to develop innovative solutions to protect the environment and conserve resources. For example, process improvements to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste have positioned DuPont as an environmentally friendly company.
DuPont’s efforts have had a major impact on other companies. Many companies are emulating DuPont’s success and adopting Six Sigma to improve the efficiency of their operations. This is more than just quality improvement, it’s a transformation of the entire business, and it shows that Six Sigma will continue to be an important tool in business management. DuPont’s story proves that Six Sigma is not just a theoretical management technique, but a powerful tool that can drive real change in the real world.
DuPont’s adoption and success with Six Sigma is also closely linked to its corporate social responsibility (CSR). DuPont uses the efficiencies gained through Six Sigma to create social value. For example, innovations in the agriculture sector provide farmers with better crop protection products to increase agricultural productivity, which in turn contributes to food security and economic development. This socially responsible approach to management plays an important role in ensuring the long-term sustainability of the company and building positive relationships with society.
DuPont’s adoption and success with Six Sigma is an example of a management transformation that goes beyond simple quality improvement to encompass innovation, sustainability, and social responsibility across the entire company. DuPont’s continued growth will continue to be fueled by this innovation and serve as a model for other organizations.
