Lean Six Sigma For Dummies>®, 3rd Edition
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, www.wiley.com
This edition first published 2016
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Lean Six Sigma provides a rigorous and structured approach to help manage and improve quality and performance, and to solve potentially complex problems. It helps you use the right tools, in the right place and in the right way, not just in improvement but also in your day-to-day management of activities. Lean Six Sigma really is about getting key principles and concepts into the DNA and lifeblood of your organisation so that it becomes a natural part of how you do things.
This book seeks to help managers and team leaders better understand their role and improve organisational efficiency and effectiveness.
If you want to change outcomes, you need to realise that outcomes are the result of systems. Not the computer systems, but the way people work together and interact. And these systems are the product of how people think and behave. So, if you want to change outcomes, you have to change your systems, and to do that, you have to change your thinking. Albert Einstein summed up the need for different thinking very well:
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking which caused them.
Lean Six Sigma thinking is not about asset stripping and ‘making do’. Instead, this approach focuses on doing the right things right, so that you really do add value for the customer and make your organisation effective and efficient.
The main focus of the book relates to DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control). This is the Lean Six Sigma method for improving existing processes that form a part of the organisation’s systems, and it provides an ideal way to help you in your quest for continuous improvement.
When you need to develop a new process, the Design for Six Sigma method comes into play. Known as DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design and Verify), we provide an introduction to this method in Chapter 12.
This book makes Lean Six Sigma easy to understand and apply. We wrote it because we feel that Lean Six Sigma can help organisations of all shapes and sizes, both private and public, improve their performance in meeting their customers’ requirements.
