Demystifying Design for Six Sigma

With comment from Mike Barker, Project & Process Improvement Manager, Royal Mail

There is no doubt that for many Design For Six Sigma (or DFSS for short) is seen as a game for specialists, to be approached with great suspicion and only to be applied by those who have earned their spurs by working with the DMAIC approach for many years until they are skilled practitioners.

It is undoubtedly true that you would not choose to start your personal Six Sigma journey with DFSS since some grounding in the basics of a Six Sigma DMAIC approach is helpful for understanding the philosophy and basic concepts. However, the purpose of this short article is to demystify and take the fear out of the DFSS approach and to hopefully encourage its use and more widespread application.

First of all, let us deal with the obvious question: "Why do you need Design For Six Sigma at all?". The answer is, of course , that sometimes just improving the quality of what you have today (your products, your services, your processes) is not sufficient to meet your customer desires or your business needs. Sometimes you have to do something distinctly different that delivers a distinctly different customer experience, and this is where the power of DFSS comes in. In essence, DFSS is just a structured approach that combines creativity and innovation with Six Sigma type rigour to allow highly successful new designs to be developed and then introduced effectively and rapidly into an operational environment.

DFSS, in fact, is an answer to a problem that many businesses face in today’s highly competitive environment. A recent survey of major companies in both Europe and the USA highlighted that 50% of CEOs rated innovation as critical to their future business success, while 44% of companies reported that innovation projects were not meeting the business objectives. In simple terms, they are saying ‘we have a great need to innovate, but we are not very good at delivering the business benefit!’

Looking behind this (ref 1) Bob Cooper (one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation in both products and services) highlighted some root cause reasons including:

• Too many ’ho-hum’ or trivial new products/services brought to market that do not offer compelling value or excite the consumer
• Insufficient up front work and lack of customer insight
• Ineffective project teams without the right tools

Design For Six Sigma, based on the DMADV framework (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, Validate) directly addresses these reasons and some other key issues built on the 7 key principles that underpin the approach:

Principle 1 – Design solutions driven from customer needs and values

• develop differentiated products and services that deliver a compelling value proposition. Solve major customer problems.

Principle 2 – Front End Load

• Put significant effort into upfront market, business, and technical assessments. Based on this, translate ‘Voice of the Customer’ into a winning product or service definition.

Principle 3 – Practice Iterative Development

• Customers do not know what they want until they see and feel it ! Get something constructive , an early ‘prototype’, in front of customers early. Be responsive throughout the design and development process. Build - test- feedback - refine.

Principle 4 – Take a Holistic Business Wide Approach

• Innovation and design is not just an R&D activity. Product or service development is a cross-functional team activity involving all aspects of the business; involve suppliers, stakeholders, staff and customers in developing the ideal design solution.

Principle 5 – Design solutions which minimise waste, non value added activity and deliver smooth flow

• Use Lean thinking at early stages in the design process. Make sure you design your products and services to eliminate waste, eliminate non value-added work, and maximise flexibility and responsiveness.

Principle 6 – Introduce solutions defect free

• Use Six Sigma thinking throughout the design and optimisation activity to eliminate root cause problems of defects and quality issues. Take account of ‘design for operability’ using your cross functional team experience.

Principle 7 – Creative solution generation supported by rigorous implementation

• In designing new products or services there is a time for high innovation and creativity, but this must be followed and balanced by disciplined implementation and project management.

With these 7 key principles as the foundation, the DMADV approach provides a powerful and disciplined framework supported by very practical tools. Many of these tools are identical to DMAIC, but just used in a slightly different way in a different context. If you are familiar with DMAIC you will very quickly pick up DMADV!

One tool, developed in Japan in the mid ‘50s and named the ‘House of Quality’, is a really powerful addition to the DFSS toolkit, and is the key by which the ‘Voice of the customer’ is translated into the ‘Voice of the Designer’. The use of this tool underpins, in particular, the first two principles above and provides a common language and framework for project teams to make design decisions that balance the needs and expectations of the customer with the capabilities of the organisation to deliver. For many organisations simple use of the ‘House of Quality’ approach has had a catalytic effect on their ability to successfully bring new ideas to fruition.

One such example is Royal Mail who have been using DFSS to support rethinking and redesign of their HR Advice & Support processes in order to pilot a proactive approach to delivering ‘Tomorrows HR Today'. Talking of his recent experiences with DFSS and in particular the House of Quality approach Mike Barker (Project & Process Improvement Manager) says:

"It was surprisingly easy to construct the House of Quality whilst we were running a couple of VOC sessions. From a single spreadsheet we were able to capture information about prioritised CTQs, customer quality measures, the relationship of the measures to the CTQs all in a language the customer understood. One of our Business Partners was able to take the document and use it with their customers to test the assumptions. It gave us great new insights into what was important and identified key areas we needed to focus on that have really influenced and driven our design process. We are piloting our new processes in a couple of month’s time and I’m really excited about the potential".

So, given the power and the benefits from the process, what is it that apparently prevents more widespread adoption of the DFSS or DMADV approach?

"Partly it is down to the widespread myth that Six Sigma is only about driving change in the mechanical aspects of business operations. Whilst historically (10 years ago) that may have been true, there is now a large and growing number of organisations who have become adept at using Six Sigma in all parts of the business including the more ethereal aspects of “’value creation’ . This is exemplified by GEs well known experience (for example in their Medical Products division) and more recently, for example by the experience of DuPont who have written up their story in a very readable book co-written with Mikel Harry (ref 2).

"Also, I suspect, it is down to the fact that many organisations have well established stage gate processes for managing new product or new service introduction. Even if the track record of innovation is not what the business would like, there is an understandable reluctance to throw away the well ingrained innovation or new product development (NPD) processes that already exist. The key here, of course, is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather it is to identify and select the elements of the DFSS approach that would enhance and add value to your existing NPD process and build the selected tools and techniques as appropriate into your current approach and structures. In that way you get the best of all worlds! This approach is exemplified, for example by the work of DuPont Teijin Films who have presented their highly successful work at recent conferences (ref 3)."

In summary, hopefully this short article has given you some new insights into DFSS, where it fits, the principles embedded within it, and helps break down some of the perceived barriers that get in the way of DFSS adoption.

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To learn more, Catalyst Consulting run a 4 day public Training Course entitled Design For Lean Six Sigma. Suitable for people from both transactional and manufacturing environments, this course assumes a basic knowledge of Lean and Six Sigma . The course provides training on the range of DFLSS tools & techniques and shows clearly how they link with and build on the more familiar Lean Six Sigma Improvement tools that you may already be using in your business. The practical challenges of Implementation of DFLSS will also be discussed.

References:
1."Lean,Rapid & Profitable New Product Development",Knowledge Roundtable 2005, Robert G Cooper
2."The Six Sigma Fieldbook", Harry & Linsenmann 2006 ISBN 0-385-50466-7
3. "Transforming Innovation", Andrew Ruddick Proc IQPC Six Sigma Summit, London Sept 2005