Page 37 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

Six Sigma in Service Organizations 19

3. DMAIC-based strategy mostly focuses on variation and defect
reduction. So it mostly accomplishes “do things right.” It does not
address the problems of higher performance levels and higher customer
value nor does it adequately address the issue of “do the right thing.”

In order to overcome these three deficiencies, two other Six Sigma strategies
were proposed in recent years. One is Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
(Chawdhury 2002, Yang and El-Haik 2004); the other is Lean Six Sigma
(George 2003).

Design for Six Sigma
Design for Six Sigma was first proposed to be applied to the process of new
product development for the manufacturing industry. It is a systematic
methodology that uses tools, training, project management, and discipline
to optimize the design process of products, in order to achieve superior
designs to maximize customer value at Six Sigma quality levels.

In the manufacturing industry, DFSS is needed because
• The design decisions made during the early stages of the design life
cycle have the largest impact on total cost and quality of the system. It
is often claimed that up to 80 percent of the total cost is incurred in the
concept development phase (Fredrikson, 1994).
• Poor design concepts adopted in the early design stage are easy to
correct at the early stage of the product development cycle, but are very
costly to correct at later stages.
• Superior customer value, creative concept, and robust performances of
the products are intrinsically determined in the early design stage.

DFSS can

• Design products with maximum customer value.
• Do design right upfront, to avoid costly design-build-test-fix cycles.
• Bring creativity in design.
• Reduce design vulnerabilities.
• Make design robust.
• Shorten lead times, cut development and manufacturing costs, and
lower total life cycle cost to improve the quality of the design.
Besides statistical methods, DFSS uses many other system design methods
such as quality function deployment (QFD), theory of inventive problem
solving (TRIZ), axiomatic design, value engineering, and the Taguchi
method. DFSS is also a project-based activity. The DFSS projects usually
take a longer time to finish, but they also have greater impacts. The most
popular DFSS project procedures are