Statistical Methods for Survival Data Analysis

Most of the Six Sigma books have ended up in the Editor Reports section of the book reviews. Included therein generally are works that are tangential to the statistics technologies core to Technometrics. However, I included an excellent review of the Ž rst edition (1E) of this book the Book Reviews proper (Gardner 2000), because I considered this book to be a statistics textbook. As Gardner noted, “the book may lead the reader to believe that Six Sigma is mainly about statistics” (p. 309). Both of us liked the 1E. I have used it as a primary statistics resource for people on the commercial side of BP. Gardner commented that “this book covers the widest scope of tools needed in a Six Sigma environment of any resource that I have seen.” Here is the second edition (2E) with 400 additional pages, almost as large and heavy as the legendary and curmudgeonly Juran handbook (Juran and Godfrey 1999). The statistical content remains very much intact in the 2E. The 43 chapters in 5 parts described by Gardner (2000) remain completely intact here. Of the additional pages, 200 fall within these 5 parts. The author has not just served up 200 more pages of statistical methods, although the book retains its subtitle, “Smarter Solutions® Using Statistical Methods.” Now he has even made “Smarter Solutions” into an actual registered trademark, and we will all need to cease using that particular phrase. The author calls this new book (Preface, p. xxxi) the “enhanced version” of his S4 (Smarter Six Sigma Approach) method. Note that S4 is a registered trademark as well. He calls this methodology the S4/IEE (for integrated enterprise excellence) methodology, which extends traditional Six Sigma to include “enterprise measures and improvement methodologies with tools such as lean and theory of constraints” (Preface, p. xxxi). The other 200 additional pages largely come from three additional parts to the book that are central to the “IEE” part: