The Power of Design for Six SIGMA

When last we saw Joe Meter, the fictitious hero of Subir Chowdhury's last Six Sigma book (The Power of Six Sigma), he was looking for work. His friend Larry Hogan introduced him to Six Sigma, which made Joe a huge success. According to the story, which is a novelistic construct for conveying business advice, now Joe is going to tutor Larry on a more advanced form of Six Sigma, one that delves into the very process of system design. This "meta-Six Sigma" appears to be a natural evolution of the basic Six Sigma approach, namely, to uncover the root causes of defects, inefficiency and customer dissatisfaction - and to fix them as part of the intrinsic design of the company and its processes. This book covers the design concept, but not the initial details of Six Sigma itself. Here, Chowdhury again explains a complex subject in a lucid manner, if you don't mind an alphabet soup of acronyms. We strongly recommend this book for anyone in management, or anyone who is experiencing a change initiative.

This book explains the advantages of investing in DFSS; it emphasizes that stopping at Six Sigma is not good enough because one can not go beyond 5 Sigma. Subir Chowdhury narrates the DFSS process in a very refreshing and anecdotal way. If you like reading stories and upshots, this is the book for you. Prior knowledge of Six Sigma is not required. This book only gives a high-level overview of how DMADV or DMEDDI or IDDOV was applied by a restaurant chain. I would recommend buying another thick book to get all the nitty gritty details like QFD or Robust Design Optimization because the method is as important as the result

This book is not so much a how to do Design for Six Sigma, but why. It is a very easy read with an entertaining style. I keep copies around to loan out, and occasionally to refer to.Its greatest asset for me was providing a big picture that helped explain what DFSS is to those who don't yet know the details. If you try to explain DFSS to people by jumping into the details of how to do it, they often won't have the patience to hear you out. This book helped me answer the most basic questions like "What do all the different DFSS programs have in common?". Because it is such an easy and entertaining read, it can be used to generate enthusiasm in the team. It is definitely not a dry technical book.Be prepared to order more books that give more detail on how to do DFSS.