Page 42 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

20 Chapter One

shorter time to market will achieve tremendous competitive position,
because the psychological effect—the increase of customer expectation
to other competitors—will be very difficult to overcome by latecomers.
Many techniques are used to reduce time to market, such as

■ Concurrency: encouraging multitasking and parallel working
■ Complexity reduction
■ Project management: tuned for product development and life-cycle
management

In the Six Sigma approach and according to the whole quality concept,
improving the quality of managing the product/service development
cycle is a part of the strategy. Therefore, improving whole quality will
certainly help reduce time to market.

1.5 Summary

1. Quality is defined as the ratio of performance to expectation.
Performance is determined by how well a product or service can deliver
a good set of functions which will achieve maximum customer satis-
faction, and how well the product or service can deliver its function
consistently. The customer’s expectation is influenced by price, time to
market, and many other psychological factors.
2. The best quality assurance strategy is “Do the right things, and
do things right all the time.” “Do the right thing” means that we have
to design absolutely the best product or service for customers’ needs
with low cost, or “quality in design” to ensure that the product or ser-
vice will deliver the right set functions to the customers. If we do not
do the right thing, such as good design, there is no way that we can
succeed. “Do things right all the time” means not only that we have
good design but also that we will make all our products and services
perform consistently so that all customers will be satisfied at all times.
3. Quality assurance strategy is closely related to product/service life
cycle and the product development cycle. The historical development of
quality methods started downstream in the product development cycle.
Modern quality assurance strategy is a systematic approach covering
all stages of product life cycle, with more emphasis on upstream
improvement.
4. Six Sigma extends the scope of quality from the product quality
alone to the quality of all aspects of business operation. Therefore, the
“Do the right things, and do things right all the time” strategy is
applied to all aspects of business operation. The Six Sigma approach is
the approach for business excellence.