Six Sigma in the Office

Six Sigma is a fact-based, data-driven methodology of waste reduction that was originally developed by Motorola in the mid 1980s to address manufacturing problems. In the late 1990s, service organizations began adopting the Six Sigma philosophy to improve their transactions with customers. But one area overlooked for improvement by most of these companies was their support functions-human resources, marketing, finance, accounting, auditing, purchasing, billing, credit approval, IT, security, and maintenance. These office areas are the ones targeted by this book because they offer tremendous untapped opportunites for cost savings.
Readers will quickly learn that the Six Sigma improvement strategy is not just a collection of statistical techniques, but a step-by-step set of operating instructions detailing how to systematically apply these tools in the correct sequence, and at the proper time, to improve the performance of your office operations and administrative functions.
Written for those who work in offices, the statistical techniques covered in this book are very easy to learn and successfully apply. Because these methods are presented at an introductory level, no prior experience with statistics is necessary.
Additional benefits...
Many practical ideas are presented for collecting data (with minimum sample sizes), generating ideas about potential causes of business problems, verifying major causes, and successfully implementing cost-effective solutions.
Over 40 easy-to-apply statistical techniques are fully explained and illustrated with many examples.
A matrix of techniques versus steps indicates when a particular tool should be applied.
Numerous flowcharts detail the correct application of a chosen technique.
Over 600 graphs and illustrations demonstrate the proper data-analysis methods.
A multitude of real-life examples and case studies from a wide variety of businesses illustrate the proper application of the Six Sigma strategy.
No special software programs are needed, only pencil, paper, and common sense.
Whether you work for a manufacturing company, a service organization, or a non-profit, the material in this book will help you enhance the performance of all your support operations.
This text should be on the bookshelf of every office manager.

For the past 26 years, Davis R Bothe has been the Director of Quality Improvement for the International Quality Institute, a consulting firm with a worldwide client base. He has also worked as a system analyst for NASA, a quality engineer for General Motors, and served as an adjunct professor of Statistics at Eastern Michigan University and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
He has published numerous articles on quality improvement and is the author of the SPC for Short Production Runs Handbook, Industrial Problem Solving, Reducing Process Variation, and Measuring Process Capability.
Davis is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality, a certified quality engineer, a certified reliability engineer, and a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt. He is on the editorial review board of the Internaitonal Six Sigma Journal and a member of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to the ISO Technical Committee 69 on the Application of Statistical methods. Davis is listed in Who's Who in the World and in the 1st edition of the International Who's Who in Quality.