Page 173 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

146 Chapter Five

5.3.9 Exiting step 2
What needs to be done, from the DFSS viewpoint, is to make sure that
functional requirements (FRs) derived from the phase 2 QFD are opti-
mized. Effectiveness and efficiency can be achieved by having the entire
DFSS team plan the next design tasks in the DFSS algorithm upfront.
Activities that should be considered include physical and process struc-
ture development, optimization and transfer function development,
tests and designed experiments, validation, reliability methods, and
other DFSS algorithm activities. The team needs to map the relation-
ship of each activity in the DFSS algorithm to translated design (product,
service, and process) characteristics. A matrix is created to compare the
list of brainstormed design activities to the list of translated and imple-
mentable actions. Following QFD ratings, the relationships are desig-
nated as a “none” relationship, a “weak” relationship, a “medium”
relationship, or a “strong” relationship. In addition, the design list of
activities may be improved by adding steps to cover missing or weak
areas of the matrix in the original list and deleting redundant activities
that are already sufficiently covered by other planned design activities.
The DFSS team may consider combining activities to gain efficiency.
Once the engineering activities are planned, workload and timing
can be established and resources allocated. Recommended thoughts in
this context include

■ Use a project management approach such as the critical path
method (CPM) in planning. The DFSS team needs to map out a
sequence of planned events, determine which events must be done in
series and/or in parallel, and identify the critical path. Project man-
agement software is ideal for such a task.
■ Understand timing, resource constraints, and milestones. Workload
cannot be established until the timing resource is understood.
Constraints with respect to resources and budget also need to be
assessed, as well as the requirements for various milestones in the
development cycle. In crisp situations, the project evaluation and
review technique (PERT) may be used to document the different
activities of the project plan, with latest and earliest start and fin-
ish times for each activity with no slippage on the projected com-
pletion date. A project Gantt chart with schedule, events, and DFSS
team responsibilities should be detailed. Milestones are deter-
mined, agreed on, and synchronized with the company design devel-
opment process. Milestones serve as communication “tollgates” to
ensure that the team review and update management about their
progress prior to getting approval to proceed to the next step of the
DFSS algorithm. Typically, milestone review distribution is usually
dense toward project closure, a paradigm that should be changed