Page 135 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

110 Chapter Four

4.3 DFSS Deployment Prerequisites
Deployment is, of course, key. The impact of DFSS initiative depends on
the effectiveness of deployment, specifically, how well the Six Sigma
design principles and tools are practiced by the DFSS team (including
the black belts and green belts together with the subject matter experts).
Intensity and constancy of purpose beyond the norm are required to con-
stantly improve deployment. In long races, whether leading or lagging,
those who go the fastest win. Rapid deployment of DFSS plus commit-
ment, training, and practice characterize winning companies.
Successful DFSS deployment requires the following prerequisites:
1. Top- and medium-level management commitment. If top and
medium management teams are not on board with deployment, DFSS
initiative will eventually fade away.
2. Existence of a program management system. Our observation is
that a project roadmap, or a design algorithm, is required for success-
ful DFSS deployment. The algorithm works as a campus leading black
belts to closure by laying out the full picture of the DFSS project. We
would like to think of this algorithm as a recipe that can be further tai-
lored to the customized application within the company’s program
*
management system that spans the design life cycle. We usually
encounter two venues at this point:
†
■ Develop a new program management system (PMS) to include the
proposed DFSS algorithm. The algorithm is best fit after the R&D
stage and prior to customer use. It is the experience of the authors
that many companies lack such universal discipline from a practical
sense. This venue is suitable for such companies and those practic-
ing a variety of PMSs hoping that alignment will evolve. The PMS
should span the design life cycle presented in Chap. 1.
■ Integrate with the current PMS by laying this algorithm over and
synchronize when and where needed.

In either case, the DFSS project will be paced at the speed of the
leading program from which the project was derived in the PMS.
Initially, a high-leverage project should target subsystems to which
the business and the customer are sensitive. A sort of requirement
flowdown, a cascading method, should be adopted to identify these

* Design life cycle spans R&D, development, manufacturing, customer, and postcus-
tomer stages (e.g., service and aftermarket).
† Examples are advanced product quality planning (APQP) in the automotive industry,
integrated product and process design (IPPD) in the aerospace industry, the Project
Management Institute (PMI) process, and the James Martin process in software industry.