Customer Reviews

Power of Design for Six Sigma

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

I read this book as an introduction to the concept of Design for Six Sigma. My motivation to do this was that my company has begun implementing the management technique. Like Mr. Chowdhury's preceding book The Power of Six Sigma, this book has some serious flaws.

First of all, despite being a better-written book than the previous "Power" book, it is still hampered by a jumble of unrelated examples and metaphors. In this installment the master has become the disillusioned student and his student has become the confident master.

This book does provide a basic overview of Design for Six Sigma, but once attain is a cleverly disguised attempt to make money by exploiting the latest management buzz.

This books is slightly longer that The Power of Six Sigma. However, the author's writing style continues to distract you from easily learning the information.

My recommendation is to check it out from the library if you really want to read the book for the basic introduction to Design for Six Sigma.

Written with "The Goal" in mind - this book on DFSS is a very general, very light overview of the DFSS approach using the story approach. It reads fast and like a novel, with the protagonist suffering career angst, and discovering DFSS as an elixr to reenergize him. If you are looking for a easy read and very introductory book on DFSS, this would be a decent choice. Don't expect to walk away an expert, but you may walk away a little smarter.

This book is as silly and stupid as his last DFSS book "Design for Six Sigma". Don't buy it, don't borrow it! If you are looking for a serious book try "Design for Six Sigma: Innovation for Enhanced Competitiveness " by Gregory Watson instead.

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 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.