Lean Six SIGMA Demystified

Jay Arthur does demystify the subject. For anyone just getting started in this area this book is a terrific introduction and sets the stage well for any further reading. The author's style is clear, concise, and engaging. It's very clear he's "been there, done that" and he offers a good amount of practical advice based on his experiences. The book is a bit light on management aspects of the process but there are other good books that go into that arena. This was one of easiest reading business texts I've laid hands on.

1. What can be accomplished with lean Six Sigma? Double your speed without working harder, double your quality, and cut costs and boost profits. 2. Ten ways to know, if you need Lean six sigma: Customer complaints, employee complaints, blaming customers, blaming employees, return product increases, warranty costs climb, customer abandonment, sales remain flat, margins are thin, and growth stagnates. 3. The end of common sense rejects the notion that process improvement is just common sense. Process improvement is reducing defects, delays, and costs. 4. People are natural problem solvers. The S-Curve suggest that everyone is quick to adopt a new paradigm (cell phone vs wire phone). "The instinctive methods of solving problems level off at 1% to 3% error." However, this is where the next level of performance can be achieved: Innovation, Operation Efficiency, and Customer Satisfaction. Six Sigma breaks through to new levels of productivity and profitability. 5. One in eight workers are in manufacturing jobs, today, verses, one in three, during WWII. In the past decade over 3 million manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or obsolete. Structural changes in manufacturing employment are more serious matter and cannot be solve by fed interest rate adjustments. 6. Apparel and Textile, high skilled employee requirements are a concern. The apparel and textile business requires skills to operate instruments and controls, maintenance parts and provide transportation, and handle and mix chemicals. 7. Manufacturing employment growth has been flat over the last 50 years. 90% of manufacturers are small businesses. 8. Every business suffers from three profit eating problems that can be solved by six sigma: delay, defects, and variation. 9. All that matter is how much money that you keep. Work on weaknesses in marketing, sales, invoicing, billing, shopping, purchasing, and payments. 10. Have you ever walked into someone else's business and almost immediately notice some way that they could improve their operation to be better, faster, or cheaper? Why haven't they noticed the obvious? We all get trapped mentally inside of our companies and our orientations because we spend so much time working in them. It takes mental gymnastics to step outside of our business. Watch process not people. 11. Process oriented businesses rely on mistake proof processes to ensure care is delivered on time and error free. 12. Watch your customers, not your people. What are your customers doing? 13. Making your product more efficient is a great use of time. 14. Problem solving methods will work for one set of problems but not another (early success and later failure cycle). 15. Companies that achieve lasting success do so by getting better over time through focused improvement. 16. 20% of what you do will produce 80% of the results. 17. The secret of success is to avoid trying to do everything and instead focusing on the most important and highest leverag

A teacher once said that a sign of brilliance is the ability to make the overly complex simple. Jay is one of those people who can take advanced statistical techniques and boil them down until he has theory and techniques usable by the common man. If you're not designing and manufacturing missiles, jet engines, artificial hearts or CAT scans, you probably will never have an opportunity or need to employ the most advanced tools of Six Sigma. Nevertheless, you shouldn't miss out on the competitive advanatage and the other benefits Lean Six Sigma can bring to your business; this book allows you the opportunity to blend the best of Lean Manuafacturing and Six Sigma together, so you can compete "better, faster, and cheaper." Most practitioners will tell you that we use the same few tools over and over again and make tremendous impact on the businesses of our clients. I especially like the software (QI Macros) that he mentions in his book. For years, we've been struggling with engineering-based software that is complicated enough that I have to pull out my manual every time I want to use it---and, then, my clients can't read the data as they don't have that expensive package. The QI Macros run on Excel, so just about everyone in an office setting has access to the the data, which makes it so much easier and user-friendly. I've been using Jay's products for about 8 years now, and immediately ordered this book as soon as he sent me an email saying that it was going to be released. His book and other learning materials hold a prominent space in my Quality improvement library.

This is a very well written book that explains the lean six sigma concepts in a way that is easy to understand. Would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to improve their processes, eliminate waste and improve lead times.

Reading this book was like a breath of fresh air. It's very well-written, easy to read, and uses a down to earth style, with a lot of great humor sprinkled in. It is very different from most books on quality and process improvement I've read. It recommends a pragmatic approach to problem-solving that simplifies the principles from Lean and Six Sigma and uses just a few basic tools to focus on 90% of the process problems a business wrestles with. I found the streamlined process improvement approach which is outlined in the book to be very helpful.