Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean

Preface

The purpose of this book is to show how, using the principles of Visual Six Sigma, you can exploit data to make better decisions more quickly and easily than you would otherwise. We emphasize that your company does not need to have a Six Sigma initiative for this book to be useful. Clearly there are many data-driven decisions that, by necessity or by design, fall outside the scope of a Six Sigma effort, and in such cases we believe that Visual Six Sigma is ideal. We seek to show that Visual Six Sigma can be used by a lone associate, as well as a team, to address data-driven questions, with or without the support of a formal initiative like Six Sigma.

To this end, we present six case studies that show Visual Six Sigma in action. These case studies address complex problems and opportunities faced by individuals and teams in a variety of application areas. Each case study was addressed using the Visual Six Sigma Roadmap, described in Chapters 2 and 3. As these case studies illustrate, Visual Six Sigma is about exploration and discovery, which means that it is not, and never could be, an entirely prescriptive framework.

As well as using the case studies to convey the Visual Six Sigma Roadmap, we also want to use them to illustrate Visual Six Sigma techniques that you can reuse in your own setting. To meet this goal, sometimes we have deliberately compromised the lean nature of the Visual Six Sigma Roadmap in order to take the opportunity to show you extra techniques that may ...