Page 269 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

238 Chapter Nine

degree of ideality. The ideality of the system will increase in the following
cases:
1. Increasing benefits
2. Reducing costs
3. Reducing harm
4. Benefits increasing faster than costs and harm
From the TRIZ point of view, any technical system or product is not a goal
in itself. The real value of the product or system is in its useful functions.
Therefore, the better system is the one that consumes fewer resources in
both initial construction and maintenance.

When the ratio becomes infinite, we call this the ideal final result (IFR).
Thus, the IFR system requires no material, consumes no energy on space,
needs no maintenance, and will not break.

9.2.4 Contradiction

From the TRIZ standpoint, a challenging problem can be expressed as either
a technical contradiction or a physical contradiction.

Technical Contradiction

A technical contradiction is a situation where efforts to improve some
technical attributes of a system lead to deterioration of other technical
attributes. For example, as a container becomes stronger, it becomes heavier,
and faster automobile acceleration reduces fuel efficiency.

A problem associated with a technical contradiction can be resolved either by
finding a tradeoff between the contradictory demands or by overcoming the
contradiction. Tradeoff or compromise solutions do not eliminate the technical
contradictions, but rather soften them, thus retaining the harmful (undesired)
action or shortcoming in the system. Analysis of thousands of inventions by
Altshuller resulted in formulation of typical technical contradictions, such as
productivity versus accuracy, reliability versus complexity, and shape versus
speed. It was discovered that despite the immense diversity of technological
systems and even greater diversity of inventive problems, there are only about
1250 typical system contradictions. These contradictions can be expressed as a
table of contradiction of 39 design parameters (Table 9.1).

From the TRIZ standpoint, overcoming a technical contradiction is very
important, because by overcoming a contradiction, both attributes in the
contradiction can be improved drastically and the performance of the system