Customer Reviews

Design for Six Sigma in Technology and Product Development

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Disclosure: I'm a competitor of Skip's in the Design for Six Sigma field.

Skip obviously knows his stuff - he's written one of the most detailed descriptions of DFSS around. His differentiation of a methodology for technology development and product development is an important concept. The book provides a detailed step-by-step description of how to design a product for Six Sigma performance.

However, the book is really a tough read. I've been working in the DFSS field for the last 7 years and I found it a tough go. The methodology descriptions, while detailed, suffer from a lack of examples or a case study.

My other critique is that Skip describes the DFSS "nirvana" - if your development process is a bit informal, you'll start asking yourself "How in the world will I ever get to DFSS?" Some thoughts around how to transition from a typical development process to a DFSS-based approach would have been helpful.

Finally, one of my clients handed this book out to virtually all their engineers at the beginning of their DFSS iniative. When, a year or two later, I'd ask the engineers if they had the book, the answer was invariably "Yes." When I'd asked if they'd read the book, however, the answer was just as invariably "No."

If you already know about DFSS, its a great reference. If not, go buy one of the introductory books first.

This is really two books in one, and requires a close read to keep the two separate. One book is a description of the product development process / technology pipeline. The second book is a very good description of the DFSS process and the use of the specific tools within each step of the process and their interrelationships. The author does a good job describing the process of developing transfer functions.

This is not a casual read. However, it goes well beyond some of the other DFSS books I have read which are merely a data dump on a collection of tools.

I would definitely place this at the top of my DFSS read list.

I don't disagree that Creveling's book is a challenging read, but I do think it's a worthwhile and reasonably comprehensive text on the topics. Many of the methods presented require a certain level of sophistication to execute correctly. If you don't understand the material, maybe you shouldn't be trying to use some of the tools.