Page 95 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

70 Chapter Three

ahead of the competition. This improvement is not merely a fine-
tuning of existing product.
■ Development of a product with new marketing concept: An exam-
ple is the development of sport utility vehicles in the 1980s and
1990s.
■ Technology push product development: Many research results are
coming out from universities, research institutions, and so on, and
many patents are created every year. Manufacturers are bringing
these new technologies into their products.

3.2.4 Risk control in product development—
the stage gate process
From previous discussion, we can see that product development is a
complicated process that consists of several stages, many projects,
and different teams and individuals. In such a circumstance, keeping
good communication and making sure that everyone is on same page
are really difficult. At the same time, the market condition, the
company’s financial condition, and priority may change, which may
trigger design changes in the middle of the product development
process. All these turbulences, miscommunications, rushes, and chaos
could create design flaws in the product design, create high risk in
launching the product, and result in poor quality in produced prod-
ucts. Project teams and individuals could also do poorly in project
management, causing excessive consumption in resources and exces-
sive time delays.
To control these risks, the stage gate approach was proposed
(Cooper 1990) to manage the product development process. A typical
stage gate process is illustrated in Fig. 3.8. We can see that there is
a gate after each of the product development stage. A gate review
will be conducted at the end of each stage. In each gate review, gate-
keepers, who are usually senior managers involved in the product,
and all relevant product team members will go through a rigorous
review process. A big checklist of items related to market and cus-
tomer values, technical risks, design details, financial spending and
returns, and strategic alignment issues will be reviewed for each
project. The decisions made in gate reviews include passing, rework-
ing, or killing of projects and design tasks. In principle, the product
development cannot go to the next stage unless all the gate review
items are resolved.
Stage gate is an effective process to control the risk, but many gate
reviews are excessively lengthy, and they could hold a product devel-
opment team at a standstill for a long time.