Detailed review of:

Reliability and Six Sigma

The book consists of 10 chapters as follows:

Six Sigma is essentially a measure of process capability and allows less than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Several top companies, like Motorola (where the concept originated and was used for the first time), General Electric, Honeywell, etc have embraced Six Sigma as their

companies' strategy for quality improvement and saved billions of Dollars. Six Sigma as a strategy of designing new products (DFSS) is a way to implement Six Sigma methodology early in the life cycle of a product. Thus, extending Six Sigma concept to reliability improvement through design can be quite rewarding business strategy. Reliability ensures failure free design whereas Six Sigma ensures defect-free process. Although quality engineers are quite familiar with Total Quality Management and Six Sigma methodologies, this concept is relatively new to reliability engineers. Therefore, the authors have attempted to provide sufficient introductory background of Six Sigma to reliability engineers and also ample amount of reliability background to quality engineers at large. In fact it would not be wrong to say that the authors have tried to provide two texts in one volume. The quality and reliability engineers – both use statistical and probability tools for their jobs. The book provides these tools in ample measure, which is not very different from any standard reliability text, of course, superimposed by Six Sigma measures. Software reliability chapter is an added bonus to a reader. In fact, chapters on Design for Reliability and Six Sigma and Reliability and Six Sigma Management would be found useful by the reliability engineers. The book is interspersed with several useful case studies from live examples, which make a good reading for a beginner in the subject. The book is recommended to all those who would like to see symbiosis between improved reliability design of a product and Six Sigma strategy for performance improvement.

Krishna B. Misra

Review published in the International Journal of Performability Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 2008, p. 242.