Page 56 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

34 Chapter Two

■ The business identifies an opportunity to offer an entirely new prod-
uct or services

DFSS is not a quick fix; it will take more effort in the beginning, but it
will pay off better than the regular Six Sigma process improvement in
the end.

2.4 Overview of Six Sigma
Process Improvement
In a Six Sigma project, if the Six Sigma team selects the regular Six
Sigma process improvement strategy, then a five-stage process will be
used to improve an existing process. These five stages are

■ Define the problem and customer requirements
■ Measure the defects and process operation
■ Analyze the data and discover causes of the problem
■ Improve the process to remove causes of defects
■ Control the process to make sure defects don’t recur
(See also Table 2.1.) This five-step strategy is also called DMAIC
(define-measure-analyze-improve-control). We will briefly describe
the five steps. Here we assume that the process follows a SIPOC
model.

2.4.1 Stage 1: Define the project and
customer requirements (D or define step)
When we need to launch a Six Sigma process improvement project, the
process under improvement seldom performs satisfactorily; at least,
we believe that this process has a lot of room for improvement. Usually
the “define” (D) stage can be done in the following three steps:

Step 1: Draft project charter, which includes

1. Business case
2. Goals and objectives of the project
3. Milestones
4. Project scope, constraints, and assumptions
5. Team memberships
6. Roles and responsibilities
7. Preliminary project plan