| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Operations Consulting Six Sigma Training |
| Founded | 1994 (as Six Sigma Academy) |
| Headquarters | New York |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Scott Miller (CEO) Dave Fuente (Chairman) David Niles (President) |
| Website | www.ssaandco.com |
SSA & Company is a privately held global business operations consulting firm headquartered in New York. The firm was originally founded as the Six Sigma Academy in 1994 by the progenitors of the Six Sigma revolution at Motorola.[1] SSA & Company provides consulting, execution, and training services to companies in strategic process management using a platform that combines Six Sigma, Lean, and other tools.[2] The firm has offices located in Aspen, Colorado; London, UK; Paris, France; Milan, Italy; Munich, Germany; Shanghai, China; Beijing, China; and Yokohama, Japan.
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In the late 1980s, the former CEO of Motorola, Bob Galvin, along with Motorola engineer Bill Smith and Dr. Mikel J. Harry, implemented a long term Six Sigma quality program to address the diminishing market share and growing quality concerns of Motorola's products.[3] Galvin then gave Harry the responsibility of creating a way for a majority of workers to be equipped with the skills and tools needed to disseminate Six Sigma efficiently throughout the company.
In the early 1990s, Harry teamed with Richard Schroeder, another employee from Motorola, to found the Six Sigma Academy. The company's goal was to teach companies and their employees how to use Six Sigma tools, specifically Lean Six Sigma,[4] efficiently to dramatically reduce the number of defects while improving the quality of their products. The first client of the Six Sigma Academy was Allied Signal whose CEO, Larry Bossidy, decided to adopt Six Sigma.[3] Around the same time, Jack Welch, then Chairman and CEO of General Electric, became interested in improving quality using Six Sigma. GE analyzed the cost savings opportunity and found that there was potential for a $7 billion to $10 billion savings.[3] In 1996, Welch teamed with the Six Sigma Academy to launch Six Sigma at GE and to train his employees in using the tools. In addition both DuPont and Merrill Lynch later became clients of the Six Sigma Academy.
In 2005 the Six Sigma Academy was bought out by Scott Miller, the former CEO of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Dave Fuente, the former CEO of Office Depot, Bob Steel, the former vice chair of Goldman Sachs, and David Niles, a former partner of Castling Group. The company is now focused on redefining how Six Sigma and similar process improvement methodologies are used and making them more relevant to today's business challenges. As part of this new identity, the Six Sigma Academy was renamed to SSA & Company in 2008.[4]
SSA & Company wrote the Lean Six Sigma curriculum in the early 1990s and eventually deployed it to some of the world's largest corporations.[1] However over the years as many executives began to abandon process management projects due to the amount of time to complete them and the complex engineering perspectives, SSA & Company created its proprietary Strategic Process Management (SPM) approach.[1][5] SPM is said to tailor Lean and Six Sigma methodologies to corporate strategy and achieve benefits in less than 90 days.[5]
The company's client list gradually grew beyond the manufacturing industry to include such diverse industries as retail, financial, health care and pharmaceutical, media, energy, and law.[2] Some of the companies SSA & Company has worked with include SuperValu, IKON Office Solutions, McGraw-Hill, Alliant Energy, Fannie Mae, Seyfarth Shaw, Charles River Laboratories, Ford, and ConocoPhilips. SSA & Company applied Lean Six Sigma tools to the Chicago-based law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which was the first time the methodology had been implemented in the legal industry.[6][7]