Design For Six Sigma: Time for Design?

Introduction

Do all your business processes work perfectly? Is everything that your customer sees as good, as it is humanly possible to deliver? Probably not, and that’s a worry, because I expect you’re working hard and have already completed several quality improvement programmes in the past few years. Although each initiative will have achieved various levels of performance improvement there may still appear to be more and more to do. So have you ever considered the nightmare scenario where your products, internal processes and your customer interactions prove inherently defective, and that even the best performance achievable is never good enough?

Let’s be honest, given a clean sheet, few of us would design our processes or products quite the way they have ended up today. The problem is that businesses evolve over long periods of time and the good intentions of the original structures are often lost or inappropriate once the passing years have had an effect and the world has moved on. What results are overly complicated processes and products that are either defective, inappropriate, or both.

Design for Six Sigma (DfSS) is a structured methodology that takes a hard dispassionate look at what you have and attempts to design an optimal solution that’s right for today’s environment and customers. Like other approaches DfSS is a structured way of doing work, which if done well, will ensure that the output from the work is as close to perfect as possible.

So could you be ready to deploy DfSS as part of your organisational improvement strategy? To support this important decision let’s first explore in more detail what DfSS is and how using the methodology may help your business to improve still further.

What is DfSS?

The value of conventional Six Sigma is now well documented and the application of this defect elimination methodology has helped many existing processes achieve their maximum entitlement – the very best they can ever be. Unfortunately, this is rarely at a truly ‘Six Sigma’ level of capability. To be at a ‘Six Sigma’ capability means that only 0.00034% of what your business produces is disappointing your customers.

To be this good usually requires a root and branch overhaul and not simply optimisation of what already exists. This is where Design for Six Sigma can help. As conveyed by the name, Design for Six Sigma seeks to create new processes and products that are ‘designed’ for an immediate Six Sigma capability. Moreover, the high levels of capability that result are in the areas most keenly valued by customers and process users. Making a direct connection between what is required and what is produced, at near perfect quality is the essence of DfSS. Increasingly, the power of DfSS is becoming recognised. A major trend has been how the time between starting a traditional Six Sigma deployment and a DfSS programme has been shrinking. In 2003, many organisations have chosen to implement both simultaneously, excepting that some benefits can be achieved through improvements while others will justify a more substantial re-design. Initially you won’t have the data to say which approach will be needed hence both are deployed. This is seldom a mistake.

What makes DfSS so exciting and distinctive is its focus on business growth and development. No longer are we limited in our thinking to how best to optimise our existing business processes, with DfSS we have the freedom to design a totally new way of doing business which is defect free from the start. Doing things in a new way and making changes for the better – that’s the heart of DfSS.

Fundamental Customer Needs:

The approach starts and ends with the ‘Voice of the Customers’. Unfortunately, people who are not the prime users often design the products and process. However, by thoroughly understanding the real customers’ needs and requirements, we are able to determine the vital factors that embody ‘quality’ to the users. Don’t be fooled, the overtly stated needs are often superficial and knowledge of the fundamental needs is the key to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Once uncovered, these factors (referred to as Critical-to-Quality factors or CTQ’s) provide the basis for the DfSS process design. The Kano model is useful in understanding what’s important to the customers. Consider, a service provider such as a hotel manager – is it the ‘basic’ requirements (hot water, clean towel) or the ‘better’ requirements like the size of room, or maybe the ‘delight’ factors like the fruit bowl on the table or the complimentary drink that really make the difference? What does the customer really want and what level of cost gives the maximum return? In other words, what is it that the customer is really ready to pay a premium for? Looking at your business from the outside can be a sobering experience as well as an essential starting point.

As always, the best evidence comes from those who are already using DfSS and realising the benefits. Make no mistake; this is a rapidly growing list of companies. For example, the low cost airlines didn’t take an existing model and improve it. Their cost of filling a seat was 1/10th of that of the established carriers. This took a fundamental understanding of a customer need and a radical re-design of how to deliver that requirement. Looking at your processes through the eye of the customer is key.

But it’s not just in business process re-engineering that DfSS has had an impact. Imagine bringing new products out at twice the rate of the competition. Products that need little or no servicing - imagine customers that are willing to pay the premium. The fit between DfSS and new product introduction is very close and well established.

Getting Started with DfSS:

So perhaps you are at the point where just improving existing products and processes will not give you (or your client) the benefits you expect. This is where products, processes, and business models need to be completely reinvented. So accept that all work is a process and apply this concept equally to transactional and service environments not just to the traditional manufacturing ones. In doing this, all processes can be mapped, measured, and analysed in terms of outputs relevant to the customer. The days of functional ownership and departments, organised around a management hierarchy is not the DfSS way. So get started by viewing your business as a collection of key processes, for example: S&OP, Innovation, Billing, etc. Next, document them and map out what processes you have in order to compare how well they deliver versus what the processes are intended to deliver. When compared against the fundamental customer needs the gaps can become very obvious.

The DfSS methodology will also support the development of alternative products and processes that could potentially meet the needs more fully. This will ideally establish the simplest way of fulfilling all customer requirements. Reducing the steps and complexity is a perfect way to de-clutter our work and more cleanly meet the requirements at lowest cost. In other areas new features will need to be added that enable defect free operations. Perhaps the best of all solutions lies within another industry. Using TRIZ techniques and benchmarking studies we can often fast track to an even better solution that delights everyone. Predicting design performance at this early stage is a key benefit from DfSS as opposed to the always more expensive and disruptive re-designs post launch or cutover.

Several methodologies exist (for example DMADV, IDOV, IDROVE, etc) but all are data driven and organised by progressive phases. Each phase is separated by well-defined stage-gate reviews and assessment. The DMADV methodology can be summarised as follows (also see Figure 1):

• Define: in which the high-level business case is established and the project scope determined. The team is formed and the aims agreed.
• Measure: in which the target processes/products (if in existence) are measured and the fundamental customer needs are gathered and analysed. If nothing exist the measurement changes to focus solely on the unmet needs within the market via rigorous ‘Voice of the Customer’ studies.
• Analyse: here all the potential solutions are generated and their performance versus the needs is assessed and predicted. As a result, the optimum concept can be selected that matches the needs with the right cost and internal capability.
• Design: the right concept is developed in detail and becomes a tangible reality for the business and their customers.
• Verify: the performance of the new product or process is evaluated and, if at the required and predicted level of capability, the project can be considered a success and closed.

Fundamentally, and like all good ideas, DfSS is straightforward common sense. However, the complexity of any major design programme can often defeat even the clearest thinkers. That’s why using the methodology and the vast array of underlying tools, has become so valuable to so many practitioners.

So is now the Time?

In summary, DfSS is a new and powerful methodology that has already been proven to create significant and lasting value for many businesses across several sectors. It focuses on designing something new rather than evolving what you already have.

Consequently it can become the operational tool for re-engineering your entire business, as well as at the individual project level. The basic goal of DfSS is to directly connect the fundamental needs of your customers to what you actually deliver – sounds simple, then why are you still waiting?

_________________________________________

About the author:

Dr Paul Donnellan, is a widely recognised Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma expert who now works within Celerant Consulting’s Operational Leadership in Europe. He has extensive experience implementing Six Sigma in leading companies worldwide. Paul is a graduate of King’s College London and has 15 years industry experience with the ICI, DuPont, and DuPont Teijin Films businesses before joining Celerant Consulting in 2003.

About Celerant:

Celerant’s approach ensures DfSS & Six Sigma plus other recognised routes to managing performance change (such as Kaizen, Lean, TRIZ, benchmarking and Shainin) really work for the client. Celerant Consulting provides a unique combination of advice, training, coaching and ongoing implementation support.

Celerant has headquarters in London and offices in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the USA.
http://www.celerantconsulting.com