I'll tell you right away, I didn't read this entire book. In fact I only browsed it. I was put off by the first half of the book which disses just about every other flavor of Six Sigma out there. Of course, this book tells you the *right* way to do it. As to jargon: on page 332 he uses the acronym NOAC (next operation as customer). Then he goes on to talk about it for two pages without ever really defining it. You see, he's a professional. Don't try this at home.

If you need a cook book and love jargon, this is the book for you.

I'm sure no expert in the Six Sigma area, but I've read five or six books in the space and particularly liked this book. I'm a business person who has some responsibility for process efficiency and effectiveness and this book gave me more useful information about process measurement, process change and necessary culture change than any of the other books I've read. I particulary liked Chapter 14, which extends the quality moment to knowledge workers in service processes - the kind of processes that dominate US businesses today, even in manufacturing firms.

Mr. Bhote's analysis of the problems with these processes and his prescription to make them faster, better and cheaper is extensive and works in my business. Unlike the reviewer above, I think his description of Next Operation As Customer (NOAC) is both complete and addresses a VERY large problem for workplaces in all advanced countries - how to measure and improve business processes that are driven by the inventive, innovative work of white collar people. After all, the largest cost element, in aggregate, for US business is the direct labor cost of knowledge workers. His book is the only one I know that systematically addresses ways to get measurable productivity gains from this big corporate expense.

I can't speak to the efficacy of this book for Six Sigma green belts, black belts and master black belts. I am none of those. However, if you are a business person responsible for getting the most from your most expensive element of production, you won't be disappointed with this book.

First, let's get the negative stuff out of the way. The first 1/4 of the book contains a lot of comparisons between the author's methods and everyone else's. Not surprisingly, his consistently rates highest. Included are tables with numerical ratings of the different experimental design strategies but no explanation is given for where the numbers come from. Skip it.
The meat of the book is its exposition of Dorian Shainin's DOE methodology. I am not claiming to have made an exhaustive survey of the literature on this subject, but he is the only one I have read to offer a workable strategy for sorting through a large number of variables in order to arrive at those that truly control the response of interest without the confounding of main and interaction effects that results from the use of fractional factorials, Taguchi orthogonal arrays and other methods. I have just four more words on this book: try it, it works.

I have used Dorian Shainin's statistical engineering techniques for years and have solved several tough problems in manufacturing environments. I have found the techniques to be quite capable of helping me solve probably 99% of the problems I have faced in manufacturing. Bhote's second edition is a welcome update from his sparse first attempt. This book shows techniques, examples and how they work and don't work. More and newer tools are shown in this edition also. I found it a little difficult to read over and over again Keki's slamming of Taguchi and classical DOE. Shainin has used these tools to develop his own tools, and while they aren't used in his strategies by name they should at least be given polite acknowlegement by the author. I often felt as if Keki was begging the reader to use Shainin's techniques instead of simply writing about them. Overall I appreciate the compilation of almost all of Shainin's techniques even though so many have service marks on them for protection. This is a wonderful reference book and I have found it very useful to use when I explain the tools to others. I did have a hard time trying to merge the message of six sigma with Shainin's statistical engineering. I couldn't figure out if Keki thought six sigma was right or wrong, but he then went on to promote his own new version of everything, the Big Q. A little too much selling.

As a practitioner of the Shainin techniques, I found the book to be a very basic primer of what kinds of gains can be made by using Dorian's techniques. Many mainstream quality practitioners dismiss Dorian Shainin's techniques as not following "the rules," or not using "rigorous" methods, or even worse, not understanding variation. What many of them don't understand is that as a quality professional in an industrial setting, our goal is NOT to understand the theoretical implications of variation. Top management wants their problem FIXED! Mr. Bhote clearly understands this and offers Dorian's techniques as a way to achieve this. He elucidates clearly on the advantages of "talking to the parts" to gain an understanding of exactly how they vary, and then using that understanding to leverage differences between parts found at the extremees of the distribution to understand WHY they are the way they are. If you want to learn how to use simple and effective techniques to solve those problems that everyone says can't be solved, this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

This book is a time waster. One of the terrible book on Six Sigma.

Several things need to be understood about this book. To begin with, the author is one of the most experienced Six Sigma professionals in the world. However, he has a very convoluted writing style that makes it difficult to understand some of the points he is trying to get across. Furthermore, this is not a book on Six Sigma per se, this is a book that describes how Ultimate Six Sigma can be applied to improve a variety of areas within a company from customer relations to supply chain management. Whenever I have heard someone criticize this book it usually revolves around the fact that the author believes his method of Six Sigma, Ultimate Six Sigma, is by far much better than most of the other Six Sigma programs on the market and this is perceived as being "preachy". I feel this type of criticism is unwarranted for the following reasons:

1. The author does not state that all of the current providers of Six Sigma are shysters, he is merely stating that some Six Sigma consultants are less experienced than others and this has resulted in some companies not achieving the desired results from implementing Six Sigma.
2. The author brings up some very interesting points in regards to how companies can improve their efficiency through new management techniques as well as through Ultimate Six Sigma. What is really nice about this book is that the author provides accompanying graphs, charts, and checklists in each chapter.
3. Since there is no one perfect book on the topic of Six Sigma, and since it is always a good idea to keep learning, this book is well worth the money. For those who buy this book and understand that it isn't a "how to" book on Six Sigma will be satisfied.

Do I recommend this book? Yes. However, if this is the first book you're thinking of buying on Six Sigma I suggest that you buy one of the following books first or in conjunction with this book:

A. Sailing through Six Sigma
B. What is Six Sigma?
C. Lean Six Sigma
D. The Six Sigma Way: How GE, Motorola, and other Top Companies are Honing Their Performance
E. The Six Sigma Handbook, Revised and Expanded: The Complete Guide for Greenbelts, Blackbelts, and Managers at All Levels
F. Implementing Six Sigma: Smarter Solutions Using Statistical Methods, 2nd Edition