Page 149 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

124 Chapter Four

DFSS initiatives are particularly vulnerable if they are too narrowly
conceived, are built on only one major success mechanism, or do not
align with the larger organizational objectives. The tentative top-down
deployment approach has been working where the top leadership sup-
port should be a significant driver. However, this approach can be
strengthened when built around mechanisms such as the superiority
of DFSS as a design approach and the attractiveness of the method-
ologies to designers who want to become more proficient professionals.
While it is necessary to customize a deployment strategy, it should
not be rigid. The strategy should be flexible enough to meet expected
improvements. The deployment strategy itself should be DFSS-driven
and robust to (withstand) anticipated changes. It should be insensitive
to expected swings in the financial health of the company and should
be attuned to the company’s objectives.
The strategy should consistently build coherent linkages between
DFSS and daily design business. For example, engineers and archi-
tects need to see how all the principles and tools fit together, comple-
ment one another, and build toward a coherent whole. DFSS needs to
be seen initially as an important part, if not the central core, of an
overall effort to increase technical flexibility.

4.9 DFSS Sustainability Factors

Many current design methods, some called “best practices,” are effec-
tive if the design is at a low level and need to satisfy a minimum num-
ber of functional requirements, such as a component or a process. As
the number of requirements increases, the efficiency of these methods
decreases. In addition, they are hinged on heuristics and developed
algorithms [e.g., design for assembly (DFA)] limiting their application
across the different development phases.
The design process can be improved by constant deployment of the
DFSS concepts and tools, which begins from a different premise,
namely, the conception and abstraction or generalization. The design
axioms and principles are central to the conception part of DFSS. As
will be explained in Chap. 8, axioms are general principles or truths
that can’t be derived, except that there are no counterexamples or
exceptions. Axioms constituted the foundations of many engineering
disciplines such as thermodynamic laws, Newton’s laws, and the con-
cepts of force and energy. Axiomatic design provides the principles to
develop a good design systematically and can overcome the need for
customized approaches.
We believe that management should provide more leadership and an
overall strategy for economically achieving product, process, and ser-
vice in the integration of the DFSS approach within a design program