Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/826827
June 2017 | ISE Magazine 35 Customers' expectations must be met or exceed- ed in order for a business to be sustainable. To deliver products that consistently meet customers' expectations, your enterprise must develop and use a product development process that trans- forms customer wants and needs into the design of products or services. Product design is a process that identifies the product purposes and functions and then al- locates them to a structural or concrete form. The typical organization spends considerable resources correcting problems during its product development pro- cess. To shorten product development time and save costs, product teams must evaluate how the product fills customer needs while simultaneously creating metrics for achieving those needs. The ability to evaluate how a potential de- sign conforms to design specifications prior to building the hardware can shorten the development cycle and decrease costs. The iterative process of design-build-test-fix is sim- ply too slow and expensive. Design for Six Sigma is a data-driven quality strategy to develop robust products and services. Design for Six Sigma provides a methodology to collect and statistically analyze the voice of the customer (VOC), develop product concepts, experiment to optimize design quality, and model the prod- uct to reduce risk to make data-driven decisions in order to create robust products and design services and processes. Continuous improvement Design for Six Sigma is integral to Six Sigma quality ini- tiatives because it employs systems engineering techniques to avoid manufacturing and service process problems. The methodology's purpose is to design a product, process or service right the first time. The design for Six Sigma methodology uses the customer's critical to quality (CTQ) characteristics throughout the design process to ensure user satisfaction. Design for Six Sigma is not intended to be a standalone process; rather, it should be a regular part of all design activities. As such, design for Six Sigma should be inte- grated into the organization's technical design reviews, also known as tollgates, during the design process to ensure that all problems are escalated appropriately. Design for Six Sigma improves customer satisfaction and net income by providing a methodology to institute change, make decisions based on analysis, gather data and ask the appropriate questions. Not using the design for Six Sigma methodology can result in a low return on investment, not to mention the risk of creating design solutions that are not innovative. Design for Six Sigma provides insight to cre- ative processes by examining critical design elements. The focus of design for Six Sigma is to emphasize the usability, reliability, serviceability and manufacturability of the de- sign in order to develop a product or service that meets or exceeds customer expectations and business requirements. Methodology Design for Six Sigma embeds the underlying principles of Six Sigma to design a process capable of achieving 3.4 defects per million opportunities. The focus is on preventing design problems rather than fixing them later after they can affect the customer. Design for Six Sigma follows a five-step methodology – define, measure, analyze, design, verify (DMADV) – that focuses on the customer: • Define: Define the problem and the opportunity a new product, process or service represents. • Measure: Measure the process and gather the data associ- ated with the problem as well as the VOC data associated with the opportunity to design a new product, process or service. • Analyze: Analyze the data to identify relationships be- tween key variables, generate new product concepts and select a new product architecture from the various alterna- tives. • Design: Design new detailed product elements and inte- grate them to eliminate the problem and meet the cus- tomer requirements. • Validate: Validate the new product, process or service to ensure customer requirements are met. Figure 1 outlines these phases and their respective tools. Design for Six Sigma puts the focus upfront in the design/ engineering process. The key focus is ensuring the team un- derstands the customers' requirements and their tolerance to performance variation. To do this, it is necessary to bring the appropriate experts together to engineer a robust solution and reduce the impact of variation. Design for Six Sigma is used when: • Products or processes do not currently exist. • New products or services are introduced. • Multiple fundamentally different versions of the process are in use. • Current improvement efforts are not enough. • Products or processes are broken and need help. • Products or processes have reached their limit. Initial process capability limits may not conform to or meet customer needs. Therefore, the design for Six Sigma interactive design process is required to make sure the result meets customer needs, the process becomes capable and the product or service functions as desired. Design for Six Sigma enables teams to understand the process standard deviation, C