Page 40 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

18 Chapter One

business leaders and their employees. To achieve business excellence,
only the product quality itself is not sufficient; quality has to be
replaced by “whole quality,” which includes quality in business opera-
tions. To understand business excellence, we need to understand busi-
ness operation per se and other metrics in business operation.

1.4.1 Business operation model
Figure 1.2 shows a typical business operation model for a manufac-
turing-based company. For service-oriented and other types of com-
pany, the business model could be somewhat different. However, for
every company, there is always a “core operation,” and a number
of other business elements. The core operation is the collection of
all activities to provide products or services to customers. For exam-
ple, the core operation of an automobile company is to produce cars,
and the core operation of Starbucks is to provide coffee service through-
out the world. Core operation runs all activities in the product/service
life cycle.
For a company to operate, the core operation alone is not enough.
Figure 1.2 listed several other typical elements needed in order to
make a company fully operational, such as the business process and
business management. The success of the company depends on the
successes of all aspects of business operation.
Before Six Sigma, quality was narrowly defined as the quality of
product or service of the company provided to external customers;
therefore, it relates only to the core operation. Clearly, from the point
of view of a business leader, this “quality” is only part of the story,

Core Operation

Impetus/ Concept Sale/
ideation development Design Production service

BUSINESS PROCESS

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

SUPPLIER MANAGEMENT
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Figure 1.2 Business operation model.