Consulting: Process Transformation:: Design For Six Sigma

Building Quality In

DFSS gets to the source of product and service imperfections by "designing-in" performance from the earliest stages of research and development. It teaches people a methodical approach to involving the right people, asking the right questions and using the right tools from the very beginning of any design project. DFSS can be applied to any industry and any product or process design methodology. It can be used to create new products and services, streamline software design and systems integration or improve existing product performance. By implementing DFSS, companies can avoid costly re-design projects by ensuring that products and processes get designed, built and launched with greater reliability and a higher performance-to-cost ratio.

The DMADV Methodology

Whether innovatively continuous or discontinuous, DFSS avoids major costs while satisfying customer requirements with its DMADV methodology: Define design and process parameters based on functional requirements, Measure customer needs and the predicted behavior of a system, Analyze the relationships between causal variables, Design a better way and Verify the integrity of the design. Practitioners focus on capturing and analyzing the Voice of the Customer, developing detailed design requirements and evaluating designs with statistical and graphical analysis tools.

Design For Six Sigma and Total Performance Excellence

In the context of Total Performance Excellence (TPE), DFSS (Design for Six Sigma) enables you to cross through the realm of improvement and into the realm of innovation. Every product, process or service has a finite lifecycle, and that's why businesses have to constantly reinvent themselves - innovate - to remain competitive.

On the continuous side of innovation, DFSS is an amplifier for the design function or process, making it more predictable and reliable, and also ensuring its outputs are manufacturable at the highest sigma levels and deliverable at the highest performance-to-cost ratios.

On the discontinuous side of innovation, DFSS tools can be applied to the R&D function, making it more likely that the R&D team will come up with the "Next Big Thing". Quite often, DFSS is powerful enough to drive the needed breakthrough, but other times a different method like TRIZ is needed.