This paperback book will be easy to find on library shelves; just look for the one with the most dog-eared pages. Lean Six Sigma Using SigmaXL and Minitab, by Issa Bass and Barbara Lawton, Ph.D. (McGraw Hill, 2009) may become your most greatly used reference book. It’s a practical introduction to lean Six Sigma project execution and written in such a way that it can be used as a training manual for beginners or as a reference tool for Black Belts.

The road map used for this practical approach is W. Edward Deming’s five-step improvement process, define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC), a statistical and scientific method of improving existing business processes. A chapter is devoted to each of the five steps explaining how it is used in lean Six Sigma.

The book is based on years of teaching the lean Six Sigma methodology to audiences from many different industries. The authors provide varied examples using two of the most widely-used statistical software suites, SigmaXL and Minitab, to better help the reader understand how to execute a lean Six Sigma project.

Lean Six Sigma Using SigmaXL and Minitab explains how to:

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