Page 17 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

Preface to the First Edition

The success of the Six Sigma movement has generated enormous inter-
est in business world. By quoting one of our friends, Subir Chowdhury,
“people’s power” and “process power ” are among the keys for the suc-
cess of Six Sigma. The people’s power means systematic organization
support led from the top, and rigorous training for Six Sigma team
members. The process power means the rigor of Six Sigma deployment
and project management processes, and a wide array of statistically
based methods. It is our belief that unlike other quality improvement
movements, where the focus is primarily on the quality of the product
or service to external customers, Six Sigma is focusing on the whole
quality of a business enterprise.The whole quality includes not only the
product or service quality to external customers, but also the operation
quality of all internal business processes, such as accounting, billing,
and so on. The business enterprises that have high levels of whole qual-
ity will not only provide high quality product or services, but also they
will have much lower cost and high efficiency because all their business
processes are optimized.
Compared with the “regular” Six Sigma that is featured by “DMAIC”
(define-measure-analysis-improve-control), the new wave of Six Sigma
is called Design for Six Sigma (DFSS). The regular Six Sigma is also
called Six Sigma improvement, that is to improve a process without
design or completely redesign the current system. Design for Six Sigma
puts a lot of focus on design and it tries to “do things right the first
time.” In our understanding, the ultimate goal of DFSS is to make a
process or a product to: (1) Do the right things; and (2) Do things right
all the time.
Do the right things means achieving absolute excellence in design, be
it in designing a product, a manufacturing process, a service process or
a business process. Superior product design will deliver superior prod-
ucts that deliver right product functions to generate great customer
excitement. Superior manufacturing process design will generate a
process that delivers the product in a most efficient, economic, and

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