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Books : Lean Six Sigma for Service : How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and TransactionsIn association with Amazon.comRating:  - Good OverviewI found this book very well written and easy to understand. Although repetitive at times Mr. George did a good job of explaining both Lean and Six Sigma concepts along with some case studies. Like I said; A good overview without all the details. Rating:  - Stop teaching, start learningTogether with K.Yang's Design for Six Sigma for Services, George's book form a pair of well-meant, but utterly ineffective efforts to translate the six sigma know-how into applicable tools for designing and improving service products and processes. Both books suffer from exactly the same problem: a very strong manufacturing background, which refuses to stay out of the way, while the authors try to explain 6S concepts and techniques under a services business light. Examples after examples are taken from pure manufacturing processes - the sort with names like "etching" and "plating". This is not a matter of bad didactics. It is not a question of learning through manufacturing examples and then easily applying the same concepts and techniques in the services environment. As both authors promptly address at their introductory "why this book" paragraphs, service processes are inherently different from manufacturing processes. Most of them do not even have any physical output. Their tasks or "repetitive units of work" have usually to be described in such high-level, generic ways that render them useless - think of the tasks of a senior associate in a large law firm. That is precisely why the services industry needs so badly a body of knowledge about quality management. George's and Yang's books, unfortunately fall far behind, on this task. These are books on quality of services that do not cover, to any meaningful length, the role of call centers in designing services processes (not to mention the whole science of quality maangement in call centers); they do not touch the subjects of scripting, Queuing Theory, yield management or any other obvious subjects that come to the mind of any practitioner of process improvement in the banking, retail, hospitality, or professional services industries. What is behind this? George is the guy that invented Lean Six Sigma. Yang is a Ph.D., practitioner and professor of quality engineering. Why can't these top-notch professionals produce useful tests on their field of expertise, when it comes to service industry applications? My hypothesis is that large services companies - the sort of clients that hire projects that are sufficiently large and complex to call (and pay) for methodology and theory building - have consistently neglected the consulting firms that specialize in quality engineering projects, like George's George Group, Yang's Enterprise Excellence Institute, as well as their eminent ancestors, Juran and Demming Institutes. These companies have, instead, hired mainly management consulting firms - the McKinsey's and Accenture's - to help them in their challenges with processes and quality improvement. Why would that have happened? The advent of business process reengineering (BPR), in the early 90's, was severely criticized by the quality engineering practitioners and warmly embraced by the management consultants. This happened exactly at the time when the IT revolution (decentralized networks, low-platform applications, etc.) opened the gates for radical innovation in services process engineering. Banks, insurance companies, hospitals, retail chains, everybody in the services industries (much, much more than in the manufacturing arena) had their plates full of opportunities for radical process innovation - the sort of projects management consultants were selling, not the step-improvements, group-oriented sort offered by quality consultants. And you know what? These clients were right in their choice. The problem is, now that all this new technology has been deployed in all these new processes, now that jobs were eliminated by the millions, all over the world, productivity has soared but so has confusion, bad services, non-conformity. So now is the time for our friends in the quality engineering trenches to step-up and actively target the services industry. Maybe they should forget about writing books, right now - they do not yet have the raw material for a complete corpus of knowledge on quality engineering for services. Maybe they should start learning from veterans of process improvement for services outside the quality management community. And definitely, they should start learning by doing large projects for large services organizations. Rating:  - a must readLSS in the context of service organizations, this is a must read. Highly exceptional introduction with practical examples. the layout of the information provides an organized roadmap for familiarization. Rating: - Great blend of Lean & Six SigmaI found this book very practical and well integrated across the Six Sigma and Lean disciplines. Case studies illustrate every principle throughout the book. I have marked mine up with highlights and use it as a reference on a regular basis. It's not the universe of knowledge on either discipline, but is a good synthesis of the two, and helpful for finding the right tools for the problem and accomplishing project goals. Rating: - Very HelpfulThis book is exceedingly helpful in explaining sometimes difficult concepts and providing an integrated, practical framework with which to implement the Lean Six Sigma methodology within a service business. I bought a copy for each of my key staff members and we worked through it together, profiting greatly from the experience. |
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