When engineer Bill Smith joined Motorola in 1987 as a senior quality assurance manager, he already had 35 years of experience to his name. He was brought in to help establish a permanent culture change at the company, one with an intense focus on metrics, data collection, and more disciplined statistical approaches to quality control methods. The result was Six Sigma, a set of techniques and tools that improve quality by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability.

At the heart of this pursuit lies Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) is essential for achieving ongoing, predictable process results. CPI is derived from the Japanese concept kaizen, a word that means ‘improvement’ or ‘change for better.’ Kaizen originated in Japanese businesses after World War II, most notably at the Toyota automotive company, as a quality assurance discipline for eliminating waste and redundancies (lean manufacturing). With the advent of Six Sigma in the 1980s, Kaizen and continuous process improvement became synonymous, and many companies, including Microsoft, General Electric, and Honeywell, have adopted the practice and enhanced their operational efficiency and product quality.