Six Sigma Professor

Review by Evans Kerrigan for What is Six Sigma Process Management?
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This is a great resource for discussing this important concept with audiences that are new to applying these ideas as well as people that have worked in this area before. Hayler and Nichols present the concepts in a clear manner adding stories and examples to make the ideas come to life for the reader. While the widely used Six Sigma is present in the title of the book, the ideas and applications are worthwhile for all companies, whether they are currently involved in a formal improvement effort or not. The book presents both tools and a system that will enable any business to better manage their processes. In my work with clients, the need for improvement projects is relatively easy to understand and implement. Most clients find it more difficult to get their arms around how to create a system to manage their processes and ensure they are using their resources against the right initiatives. This book is a great tool to use with these clients, helping them see and understand the benefits and tools to leverage their improvement efforts and improve the management of their business processes. I am using this book to help my clients now and it has helped to support their learning of these key concepts and tools.

Review by Joe Fazzari for What is Six Sigma Process Management?
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For the completely uninitiated the book holds a very basic framework and some simple guidance on the approach to performing enterprise-wide mapping+diagnostics+improvement. For anyone else, esp BB’s and MBB’s, the book may come off as lacking in substance (only 100 pages, half of which is introductory preamble), very amatuerish (eg “there was this dude named Henry Ford, you may have heard of him”) and muddled (I counted a dozen instances where terms and acronyms are introduced but unexplained until several pages later).

What you do get is the skeleton of a complete process overhaul + management system for enterprise guidance on where to focus the improvement team. This seems both bland and without *any* real-world experience to put “flesh on bones” – eg my company has recently embarked on such an exercise and the complexity of numerous physical value streams, cross-functional processes, physical flow + transactional process + system layers, not to mention product and product mix questions, moving throughput bottlenecks etc. This book gives absolutely no insight into how to manage this level of complexity and seems stuck with multi-function swimlanes as its best offering. Signs to me that the authors are spinning a concept without much expertise to draw on. My experience has been that even after you get these first DMA phases out, you need much more work producing diagnostic/causal guidance on why problems occur, not just where/how. Also, there’s no real advice on operational deployment and details on tactics, priorities, etc. Again, smells of a quick buck.

Get it if you know nothing of this area – otherwise you’ll need a cross-section of books from Theory of Constraints, Balanced Scorecards, BPM, etc to take you to the next level. 2 stars for very basic value.

Review by RODOLFO NUNEZ for What is Six Sigma Process Management?
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This book explains the basics of Sig Sigma. The book is very easy to read and has very detailed information on how to apply Six Sigma. If you need to learn FAST what Six Sigma is and How to implement it, get this book

Review by A. Urquhart for What is Six Sigma Process Management?
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Few books capture the process engineering approach taken by Motorola’s wafer fabrication engineers in the mid-1980s. Process excellence lies at the heart of both Six Sigma and the Toyota Production System for the simple reason that Motorola learnt much from its joint venture with Hitachi and later on the Cherokee project with Toshiba. Why is a process perspective so important? Because everything is process and each process step depends on a previous process step? Unlike most other books on the subject, Hayler and Nichols correctly identify the importance of external and internal customers, the use of `enabling’ value-added steps, and Kai-zen – making each step right. Whether or not someone uses the DMAIC improvement process, Six Sigma tools, the 3 Ms, Work-Out, or “bread and butter pudding” the goal is the same – to improve business performance.

(Andy Urquhart, ex-Chairman Motorola Six Sigma Steering Committee Austin, Texas)

Review by Roland R. Cavanagh for What is Six Sigma Process Management?
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What is Six Sigma Process Management addresses the basics of Process Management for the novice, as well as providing direction and details for the experienced practitioners. The Authors dispel some myths and tell some stories while laying out the path forward. The title is deceptive – this book is about Process Management – the system, the metrics, the management, the process – and is set in the context of the most widely recognized business performance improvement methodology, Six Sigma to give a point of reference. Process Management stands on its own, and is a natural component of any Customer and Process based management system, ISO, Lean, whatever you call it. As a consultant “in the trenches” with clients who desire to sustain, improve or totally re-invent their businesses, I find this book invaluable as a quick explanation of the system. I wish I’d written it.