EA Books

Lean Six Sigma Demystified: A self-teaching guide
by Jay Arthur
2007, ISBN: 9780071486507, 340pp, $34.95

A lot of books have been published on Six Sigma and Lean methodologies. The real success (bottom-line improvement, employee morale, value to customers) has still been elusive in many cases. The story is similar to TQM, ISO9001 etc. Many people believe that to implement Six Sigma, they need to engage/train black belts and green belts. This is a very heavy expense and scares off many organisations. The author’s objective is to provide a simple methodology and tools to implement Lean Six Sigma (LSS) to make dramatic improvements with a much smaller investment.

Jay makes his intentions very clear in the preface. He states that LSS is a mindset and that there are no pre-requisites of technology to apply these tools. He stresses that focus should be on results. He argues that only a very small fraction of the tools and techniques learnt as a part of black belt in the Six Sigma programme are actually used. He questions the practice of training people with material which they will forget quickly due to its non-application. He claims 90% of the problems can be solved by using a handful of simple LSS tools. He focuses most of the book on the effective application of various steps using LSS concepts and how to reap their benefits. Jay has been in Quality Improvement for around 20 years. For more than 10 years, he has been helping companies use tools like LSS to save them millions.

He has developed macros during his consulting career that can be used in Excel to do charting work. This makes it easy to analyse and identify the hidden factors causing problems. (QIMacros, when installed, are integrated with Excel and become available as a menu item). He has devoted a full chapter to using these tools using Excel in which QI Macros have been installed. It is available to readers as a download for a 90 day free trial period. This can save a lot of time in analysis and justification of the improvement project for users. It is also relatively inexpensive.

Jay uses examples from the real-world to explain the concepts. This makes it easy for readers to comprehend the concepts and how to apply them. He very appropriately mentions the three ‘profit-eating problems: delays, defects and variation’. He suggests (reiterating Deming that 85% of the problems are caused due to processes) ‘Blame your processes and not your people’. He states his message clearly that LSS is a result-oriented, project focused approach to quality, productivity and profitability. He introduces the acronym FISH (Focus, Improve, Sustain and Honor) as the steps to implement LSS easily.

Jay differentiates ‘Six Sigma and Lean’: Six Sigma is to help you improve value-added steps, while Lean can help in eliminating the non-value added delays and activities.

I have read a fair number of books on Six Sigma, including formally reviewing “Six Sigma by Geoff Tennant”. What distinguishes this book is the practical approach to reaping the benefits using LSS tools, instead of a regimented approach to implementing Six Sigma using black-belts and green-belts touted in other books. Jay has succeeded in explaining the complex tools (QFD, FMEA, DOE, ANOVA etc.) of Six Sigma in a simple way and in which situations these can be effectively used.

The author draws upon his personal experience in implementing LSS for his clients and cites a lot of case studies as examples to demonstrate the benefits to the bottom-line in using these principles. He also mentions the pitfalls that can trip these improvement projects and how to successfully get out of these traps. According to Jay, you can achieve a lot by using 4/50 rule (i.e. achieve 50% of benefits by 4% of what you do). He has coined a lot of such rules as memory joggers to aid application of LSS methodologies.

The book has contents ‘at a glance’ as well as detailed contents for each chapter. It is well supported with a detailed index at the end allowing easy search. The book also provides references on topics, which enables the reader to delve further into the topics.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in identifying and eliminating delay, defects, errors and waste in their processes and improve profitability.

Lean Six Sigma: A self-teaching guide was reviewed by Vic Manuja: Vic comes from an engineering background (M. Tech) with 10 years of R&D experience, followed by 15+ years in industry and management consulting. He is an Associate Fellow of AIM, a Senior Member of the IEEE (US) and a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality. His expertise is in matching the core values of an organisation to its operations, thereby creating synergy within the workforce, enabling real business development. He uses tools and technology that is fit for purpose delivering satisfaction to customers and higher profits to owners. He can be contacted on vicmanuja@ieee.org.