DMAIC overview (SIX Sigma)

• The Define phase of the book covers process mapping and £owcharting, project charter development, problem solving tools, and the so-called 7M tools.
• Measure covers the principles of measurement, continuous and discrete data, scales of measurement, an overview of the principles of variation, and repeatability-and-reproducibility (RR) studies for continuous and discrete data.
• Analyze covers establishing a process base line, how to determine process improvement goals, knowledge discovery, including descriptive and exploratory data analysis and data mining tools, the basic principles of statistical process control (SPC), specialized control charts, process capability analysis, correlation and regression analysis, analysis of categorical data, and non-parametric statistical methods.
• Improve covers project management, risk assessment, process simulation, design of experiments (DOE), robust design concepts (including Taguchi principles), and process optimization.
• Control covers process control planning, using SPC for operational control, and PRE-control.

DFSS covers the DMADV framework for process design, statistical tolerancing, reliability and safety, using simulation software to analyze variation and risk, and performing ‘‘virtual DOE’’ using simulation software and artificial neural networks.

Lean covers the basic principles of Lean, Lean tools and techniques, and a
framework for deployment. It also discusses the considerable overlap between
Lean and Six Sigma and how to integrate the two related approaches to achieve
process excellence.