Steven Bailey

Steve Bailey completed a 36.5-year career with DuPont’s corporate Applied Statistics Group, retiring in March 2016 as their Principal Consultant and Master Black Belt (MBB).  During his first two decades at DuPont, Steve applied Statistical Process Control (SPC), Design of Experiments (DOE), and other data-based improvement methods within a Product Quality Management (PQM) framework for many DuPont businesses. Since 1999, he drove the deployment of Six Sigma in DuPont through co-developing and coordinating their corporate leveraged Black Belt, Master Black Belt, and Champion training, as well as leading their corporate MBB Network.

Steve has made significant contributions to the development, understanding and application of the concepts and methods of total quality and statistics, not only during his consulting career within DuPont, but also for the “society at large” through his numerous presentations and publications. He received the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Chemical and Process Industries Division Shewall Award for the best paper presented at the ASQ/ASA Fall Technical Conference (FTC) in 1990. Steve has been an ASQ leader over the past 30 years, most notably as their President in 1997-98 and Chairman of the Board in 1998-99. He is a certified Black Belt and a certified Master Black Belt by both DuPont and ASQ.

Steve’s leadership role outside of DuPont in partnership of ASQ with the Six Sigma Academy (SSA) was leveraged to build enthusiasm for and help shape DuPont’s corporate adoption and implementation of Six Sigma in 1999. He functioned as the first and only Master Black Belt in DuPont's Engineering Polymers business until other MBBs in the business were trained. Steve supported 28 BBs in the US and 18 BBs in Europe, and his involvement in their Six Sigma rollout strategy was key to their achieving $52MM PTOI.  He developed and delivered Six Sigma training for all businesses, functions and regions of DuPont, including more than 20 Black Belt training waves, over 40 Master Black Belt waves with 585 MBBs trained, more than 20 Champion waves, and over 30 Green Belt waves, including an initial wave in 2000 where DuPont’s then CEO Chad Holliday and then COO Richard Goodmanson were trained.