Book Value

Six Sigma for Business Excellence: A Manager’s Guide to Supervising Six Sigma Projects and Teams
By Penelope Przekop
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, $29.95

If six sigma is Greek to you, welcome to the quality excellence program used by healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson, among others.

Actually, the statistical term does comes from the Greek. The lowercase Greek letter sigma is the symbol for standard deviation, applied to the degree of variation in a data set, group of items or a process. In plain language, six sigma describes quantitatively how a process is performing. The bottom line is to reduce costly
errors in manufacturing or services.

For example, when striving for perfection in a product at the six sigma level, there are fewer than 3.4 defects or deviations from the standard, per million units, or 99.9996 percent of acceptable units.

Describing this exacting quality-control process is Penelope Przekop's mission in the 177-page book. Przekop brings her experience as director of global quality management at J&J’s medicines and nutritionals group.

While numerous tables, graphs and real-life examples illustrate the process, busy managers who are short on time may find the dense text a lengthy task. But for fans of W. Edward Deming’s theory on quality control, Table 4.2 provides a synopsis of his key criteria and how they can be applied to middle management. As well, many examples of six sigma followers, such as Motorola and General Electric, are included in the book.

For impatient readers looking for quick information, each of the 13 chapters wraps up with a bullet summary, “The bottom line.”.

-- Diana Cawfield