77 Pillars of Quality and the Pursuit of Excellence: A Guide to Basic Concepts and Lean Six SIGMA Tools for Practitioners, Managers, and Entrepreneurs

This book offers a basic and practical guide for a manager, quality practitioner, or anyone interested in learning and understanding the fundamental principles, concepts, tools, and techniques of quality management and process improvement. This book enables managers to have a strong foundation for effective management and improvement of operations. It strengthens quality practitioners’ approach to people, products, or services and process improvement, to influence without authority. It provides practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary concepts of quality, guiding principles, and quality tools and techniques and on successfully implementing them. It helps enhance how practitioners perform their work and inspires them to strive for excellence.

The book begins with an introduction and an overview of quality, followed by listing and explaining the selected 77 pillars (basic principles, concepts, and tools) of quality, grouped under the themes of quality, Six Sigma, and Lean Management. It examines the logical understanding of these pillars and how to implement them, providing practical examples and beneficial real case studies. The stories are based on the learning and practical experience of the author--a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, a quality manager, and a university lecturer.

This book benefits employees, partners, and customers of any organization, offering a great reference for practitioners and academics alike. It serves as a call to reflect on basic quality pillars first, before embarking on a quality improvement journey. It provides a solid foundation for managers and practitioners to exceed their customers’ expectations and excel in managing their business operations.

Dr. Souraj Salah received his B.Sc. in mechanical engineering specializing in industrial production engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology, a Master’s degree of Engineering in mechanical engineering specializing in industrial engineering from Concordia University, Montreal (with Great Distinction), and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering specializing in industrial engineering management from the University of New Brunswick where he won the Graduate Student Merit Award for two times.

He is currently a part-time Adjunct Professor at Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University and also at Abu Dhabi School of Management (teaching courses like Japanese quality, quality tools and techniques, TQM fundamentals, and operations management). He also serves as a Member of the Industrial Engineering Advisory Committee at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. He also serves as a member of the advisory board for the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sharjah.

He is a Business Process Improvement Manager working in the logistics, contracting, services, and manufacturing sectors internationally. He worked for various local, multi-national and Fortune 500 companies across North America and the Middle East. His main research interests are quality control, Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, quality culture, operational excellence, and management systems. He has authored and co-authored one book published by Springer, titled: ＂Integrated company-wide management systems combining Lean Six Sigma with Process Improvement＂, and more than thirty papers which were
published in various international journals (the best of which was cited over 470 times) and has over twenty-three years of industrial engineering experience.

He is also certified as a Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Lean Leader trained by the Juran Institute, Lead Advisors, Alignment Strategies in Canada, and Johnson Controls Intl. in the USA, and as a Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment Management Systems’ (ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001) Lead Auditor by Bureau Veritas. He has led and coached several Green Belt and Black Belt practitioners in executing numerous Lean Six Sigma Projects delivering millions of dollars in savings from the Cost-Of-Poor-Quality. In 2015, he won the United Arab Emirates Quality Professional Award by the American Society for Quality (ASQ).