World Class Quality: Using Design of Experiments to Make It Happen

Bhote has produced a treasure. All manufacturing professionals would do well to internalize this short book. Besides explaining a simplified but very effective method of DOE (the Shainin method), this book does a great job of explaining another simplified but powerful SPC method: Precontrol Charts. The explanation of Shainin DOE or Precontrol Charts are sufficient to make this book enormously valuable. Yet Bhote goes farther - he puts these tools into context within the overall production Quality system. He gives a lucid thumbnail sketch of the evolutionary stages of an organization's quality system, from what he terms "innocence" to "world class", and he does a convincing job of explaining the role of managment and of the quality professional in a manufacturing organization striving for world-class qulaity. As if that weren't enough, Bhote includes an extremely powerful product design reliability tool -Multiple Environment Overstress Tests (MEOST)- and Poka Yoke (error proofing) which of course is both a design and a production methodology to achieve zero errors. The criticisms of Bhote that I have seen generally come from two camps: (1) 'purists' who have disdain for simplified DOE & SPC charts, and (2) nit-pickers who are put off by Bhote's strong criticism of classical methods and annoyed by typos. The bottom line is that the contents of this single book, in an amazingly concise manner, live up to the promise of the title. Implementing the methods as explained by Bhote will reduce variation to world-class levels and create a robust production system from design to finished product. The beauty of the Shainin methods which Bhote lays out is that they are much simpler than their classical equivalents, which makes their implementation much easier and thus more likely to be carried out.

The book explains excellent problem techniques in a very lucid manner. A must read for any process engineers, Six Sigma belts and any one in production/operation. Some of the tools the author explains (like Multivary analysis) can be extended into a statistical study (ANOVA) and more detailed results can be obtained. I wish the author does some of it in any forth coming edition atleast as an appendix (if not in main text, to keep its simplicity).

Excellent material, marred by an attitude towards other quality gurus. The author does a good job of presenting sound and fast methodologies in product quality. These techniques can be of value to every professional engaged in manufacturing and quality fields. A must read, but ignore the pungent remarks on other methods. Taguchi techniques also work well, I have used them often.

I have used Dorian Shainin's statistical engineering techniques for years and have solved several tough problems in manufacturing environments. I have found the techniques to be quite capable of helping me solve probably 99% of the problems I have faced in manufacturing. Bhote's second edition is a welcome update from his sparse first attempt. This book shows techniques, examples and how they work and don't work. More and newer tools are shown in this edition also. I found it a little difficult to read over and over again Keki's slamming of Taguchi and classical DOE. Shainin has used these tools to develop his own tools, and while they aren't used in his strategies by name they should at least be given polite acknowlegement by the author. I often felt as if Keki was begging the reader to use Shainin's techniques instead of simply writing about them. Overall I appreciate the compilation of almost all of Shainin's techniques even though so many have service marks on them for protection. This is a wonderful reference book and I have found it very useful to use when I explain the tools to others. I did have a hard time trying to merge the message of six sigma with Shainin's statistical engineering. I couldn't figure out if Keki thought six sigma was right or wrong, but he then went on to promote his own new version of everything, the Big Q. A little too much selling.

As a practitioner of the Shainin techniques, I found the book to be a very basic primer of what kinds of gains can be made by using Dorian's techniques. Many mainstream quality practitioners dismiss Dorian Shainin's techniques as not following "the rules," or not using "rigorous" methods, or even worse, not understanding variation. What many of them don't understand is that as a quality professional in an industrial setting, our goal is NOT to understand the theoretical implications of variation. Top management wants their problem FIXED! Mr. Bhote clearly understands this and offers Dorian's techniques as a way to achieve this. He elucidates clearly on the advantages of "talking to the parts" to gain an understanding of exactly how they vary, and then using that understanding to leverage differences between parts found at the extremees of the distribution to understand WHY they are the way they are. If you want to learn how to use simple and effective techniques to solve those problems that everyone says can't be solved, this is the book for you. Highly recommended.