In 2007, Cerberus Capital Management hired the former boss of Home Depot, Bob Nardelli, to run Chrysler. Earlier in the year Cerberus Capital Management had purchased a majority stake in Chrysler from DaimlerChrysler. Nardelli, while CEO of Home Depot, implemented the six sigma philosophy. The essence of this philosophy is to identify causes of variability in processes and reduce the variability—thereby increasing the quality of the process. Critics of Nardelli suggest that the implementation of six sigma at Home Depot proved that six sigma methodologies are inapplicable to widely distributed retail stores and that the attempted implementation was a flop.

Conduct research to follow the changes Nardelli implemented at Chrysler and whether six sigma was implemented as a driver of the changes.