Design for Six Sigma Archives

Why DMAIC Endures as a Robust Thought Process

From time-to-time, there are new ways of thinking or shortcuts to solving problems. However, the tried-and-true Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) thought process endures as a fundamentally robust problem-solving thought process.

DMAIC must be properly applied to be effective, however. In this article we’ll consider some important objectives within each DMAIC sub-process.

First, let’s consider each sub-process as an opportunity to perform collaborative problem solving. In the “Define” phase (for example) the stakeholders and team members mutually agree on the problem statement, goals & objectives, process under study, process start/stop points, team members, business impact, etc.

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Why Excellence May Not Be the Best

When considering a business process improvement (or some other) initiative, we also want to communicate to motivate the right behaviors. However, initiatives often seem to use buzzwords or use titles familiar to employees that have seen such initiatives come and go (the key word being “go”).

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What is Design for Assembly?

In previous articles we covered design for six sigma and design for lean. Now let’s take a look at Design for Assembly. We’ll do this by following the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) thought process, and add design for assembly (DFA) subtopics as follows:

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Why an owner of a task or deliverable doesn’t really exist…

When it comes to ensuring a task or deliverable is accomplished, we often see the word “owner” used. Perhaps surprisingly, there really is no true ‘owner’ of anything in the context of program or project management.

We can begin explaining this with two adjectives: responsible and accountable.

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Design for Lean

In this article series, we covered several topics in the area of product development and project management. We will now begin to explore process improvement with the topic “Design for Lean”. While design for lean may be a subtopic within product development, it helps us understand operational risks, operational costs, enables operational planning and process improvement.

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Critical Thinking for Product Development

Previous articles have covered product development tools and methodologies such as lean product development, agile, design for six sigma, product life cycle (PLC) and project management processes.

In this article, lets consider “the product” being developed any hardware product, software, IT system, service or new business process. We’ll use the acronym “PSSBP” (Product, Service, Software, Business Process) as an all-encompassing placeholder and to illustrate critical thinking on the topic as follows:

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What is DFx?

In a previous article, we defined design for six sigma (DFSS) as a thought process focused on maximizing customer value and minimizing cost.

More specifically, DFSS is used to reduce variability in product performance (thereby increasing value), using analytical models and our knowledge of manufacturing variability to enable specification limits on difficult-to-manufacture tolerances to be increased (thereby reducing cost).

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What is Design for Six Sigma?

For the majority of organizations, long-term success is tied directly to the new product development process. Tomorrow’s revenue and growth are tightly bound to how successful you are at launching new products.

Offering genuinely valuable, high quality products is, more than ever, the best way to capture market share. Also, more investment up-front minimizes overall expense.

…fewer design iterations to achieve the same goals (reduced time to market), more efficient production and delivery processes (reduced operating costs), fewer defects & warranty costs during the entire product life cycle (increased customer satisfaction).

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Statement of Work Fundamentals

In my last article, we reviewed a proposed Product Life Cycle process, which starts with a “Define” phase. In the “Define” phase, we are defining the project as well as the product.

We previously discussed the ‘technical leg’ of this process with the market analysis, identifying customer needs, product requirements, verification and validation, etc. [Read more…]

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A Proposed Product Life Cycle Process

In my previous article we covered the advantages of a phase and gate structure for new product development. Now we can discuss some proposed phase names for a new product development or product life cycle (PLC) process.

An organization may have an existing PLC process ‘baked-in’ to their culture and process documentation. Accordingly, there’s a wide range of PLC phase names, all of which are likely acceptable and based on solid reasoning.

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Phase and Gate Structure for New Product Development

In previous articles we defined an element of lean as a phase and gate structure for new product development. This assumes a waterfall approach to the project (versus agile product development).

A new product life cycle phase gate structure might entail, for example: “Definition, Concept, Design, Verification, Qualification, Production and End-of-Life”. (Your organization might decide on different phase names.)

There’s an apparent contradiction in using a waterfall project approach and calling it lean project management, however. A goal of any lean process is to work toward ‘single piece’ or continuous flow: agile product development is more like ‘single piece flow’ of information, versus waterfall which is more like ‘batch processing’ of information.

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Lean Project Management for Product Development

My last article covered a scalable model for lean product development depending on the number of projects and technical objectives.

Let’s start with the foundational elements from this model:

Facilitate a lean project
Understand customer needs (requirements validation and/or agile product development)
Maximize customer (product) value (product value estimation)

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