Page 99 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

74 Chapter Three

■ Information loss and recreation: This happens a lot in most
companies.
■ Miscommunication: Miscommunication among product develop-
ment team members often leads to doing the wrong work, and
then we have to redo it.
■ Searching for information, waiting for critical information: This is
certainly not a value-added activity.
Lean knowledge and information management can effectively deal
with this category of waste.
4. Waste due to poor design. The following items are included in this
waste category:
■ Excessive design requirements such as excessive tolerances, exces-
sive material specifications, excessive operator requirements, and
so on.
■ Excessive complexity in design: The simplest design is the best
design, given that we can deliver all the product functions.
■ Poor product architecture: Poor product architecture often leads
to redesign, mismatch, and performance problems.
Lean design practice can effectively deal with this category of waste.
In summary, the waste caused by poor product value can be effec-
tively dealt with by DFSS, which is the topic of this book. The other
three categories of waste can be dealt with effectively by various lean
product development approaches, which we will discuss in the next
section.

3.4 Lean Product Development Approaches

Many approaches based on lean principles are developed to identify
and eliminate the four categories of waste outlined in the last section.
We can summarize these approaches into the following three classes of
lean methods: lean task management, lean knowledge and information
management, and lean design.

3.4.1 Lean task management
Lean task management consists of several approaches that deal with
identifying and reducing the waste in workforce, resources, and time.

Reduction of nonvalue-added task time. This approach is proposed by
Ronald Mascitelli (2004) in his book Lean Design Guide Book. Based
on lean principles, all tasks performed by design engineers can be clas-
sified into the following three categories: