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DFSS - Design For Six Sigma

What is Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)?

For the Executive, a full Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) deployment in your international organization is the most powerful way known to achieve organic growth. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) will assess and tie into your stage gate or new product development process, enabling your Strategy for Revenue Growth. Strategic Deployment of Six Sigma worldwide always has a top-line focus as well as a bottom line focus. Achieving top-line improvement requires new, innovative products and services with features that excite your current and potential global customers. Successful Innovation with high-probability is achieved with disciplined approaches and strategically aligned projects. Together with Marketing For Six Sigma (MFSS), your new products and services will meet expressed and unstated needs of your key customers in domestic and international target markets, and have successful, market-altering product launches. The Design for Six Sigma(DFSS) and Marketing for Six Sigma (MFSS) process begins with market segmentation and business analysis, and ends with deploying the needs of customers into innovative, capable, robust product and service designs providing enhanced value propositions in the marketplace worldwide. If you are facing serious growth challenges, a full or pilot DFSS deployment can provide a clear path forward. The only immediate challenge is deciding to act on this information. Please click on DFSS_Info for further details. Whether you need to deploy DFSS at your locations around the world in Latin America , Asia, Europe or other worldwide locations, SBTI can assist you.

For the Product/Service Development Manager, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a way to increase the successes worldwide of your New Product and Service Development Process and achieve greater participation in the development process globally. We can start with your stage or phase gate process, and can assess how viable it is if perfect as well as current functionality. Phase gate assessment of your new product develpment process is just one key to making breakthroughs with Design For Six Sigma. Training your engineers as DFSS Black Belts and Green Belts helps them to be customer driven in design, think statistically and utilize Probablistic Design principles. Getting the right Voice of Customers is just the beginning. How to process those voices effectively into product and service design criteria is even more challenging. And once the right criteria is determined, how to create excting new concepts and features and predictably meet each criteria successfully is still another challenge. Engineers will learn how to obtain and process customer voices, evaluate solution spaces, design statistically and do probablistic modeling of new designs and services with DFSS tools and training. Decisions to move design projects forward or stop them will be based on clear statistical evidence and proven techniques and methods that get integrated into your phase-gate process. Engineering projects will be able to articulate design problems sooner and with better accuracy. Better deployment on engineering projects means greater overall success in new product and service development.

For the Engineering Professional, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a set of DFSS tools and techniques that will allow your designs to be right the first time, work better than existing and competing products, with manufacturing and supply chain support, and have greater market share. These DFSS tools used in Black Belt training include state-of-the-art Voice of the Customer(VOC) Techniques, New Concept Creation and Evaluation techniques, advanced statistical and experimental tools, plus many of the Design-For-X(Design for Manufacturability, Design for Assembly, Design for Reliability, Design for Environment, Design for Human Factors or Human Interface) methods. Learning the DFSS methods, obtaining DFSS Certification, will enhance your value as an engineer, and will make the design experience far more rewarding. These DFSS tools work in a sequence that will allow you to know at every step whether the customer and business needs are being met, exceeded or at risk.

NEWS:

* All SBTI DFSS clients receive a discount on Crystal Ball Simutlation software. Please click on DFSS_Info for further details.

* Have you seen the new SBTI Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Book by Randy Perry and David Bacon ?

This book is out and can be ordered at Amazon here.

The SBTI Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Program

Your New Product Development Process is a complex business process with a lot riding on the outcomes. SBTI has a Design for Six Sigma training program second to none, having been first deployed in 1997. The SBTI Design for Six Sigma Program has had more than 30 full strategic deployments in multi-national companies such as Tyco Electronics, Boston Scientific, Cummins, American Standard, Eastman, Sylvania, BASF, Crompton and others. DFSS consulting professionals from Polaroid, Kodak, Motorola, AlliedSignal, GE and other leading edge Global 500 companies teach this program. Many competitors offer a 1-2 week training program in DFSS. SBTI built the industry's best DFSS training and DFSS deployment program. Our approach is centered on changing how engineering is accomplished. In today's environment you do not get a second chance on new product launches. True customer needs must be found and validated prior to creating any solution concepts. Concepts must be evaluated against prioritized customer needs. The Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) approach must include customer, marketing and engineering personnel to make top line growth a reality. Once the best concept is found, delivering on that vision must be flawless. Combining statistical methodologies and the widely used deterministic engineering approach yields a better approach called Probabilistic Design. Probabablistic Design relies on statistical distributions of components and subsystems to asses the probability of failing to meet end product requirements, whether they are reliability, performance or production yields. This is more precise than the use of deterministic models alone, which often result in overly conservative or underly conservative product designs.

If you want to add Lean Methods to your DFSS program, check out the SBTI Lean Product Development (Lean DFSS) Trainng Program.

The SBTI Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) consulting approach gets integrated with your new product development process. Project development is key to great results and executives are involved from the outset to align DFSS project and business goals. With stringent student requirements and an extensive 4 to 5 week DFSS training program, design professionals can complete a Design for Six Sigma Black Belt and show quantifiable design project results based on growth, value, AND higher margins over existing or competing products. We have fully customized our Design for Six Sigma training approach with over 25 full company deployments, using diverse software suites of Minitab, JMP, Crystal Ball, Design Expert and MS Office applications, such as Excel.

DFSS Tools:

The tools in Design for Six Sigma, or DFSS, are both many and diverified across several key fields or domains. There are listening and observational tools associated with obtaining the Voice of the Customer (VOC). These DFSS tools span areas like customer interviewing, preparing for customer visits and creating a discussion outline. There are tools within DFSS that cover how to analyze these voices and images like Requirements KJ, translational worksheets and Image KJ. Developing a customer preferred product includes Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Stuart Pugh's Concept Development Matrix approach. Some of the analytical tools of DFSS include Critical Paramater Management, Reliability Planning, and Product Mapping. Many of the tools from Operational Six Sigma (DMAIC) are also included in DFSS; these are statistical and process improvement tools like Process Mapping, Failure Modes and effects Analysis (FMEA), Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA), Design of Experiments (DOE), Robust Design and Control Plans to name a few. Many of the tried and true design for quality tools are included in DFSS as well: Design for Manufactuability, Design for Reliability and Design for Assembly. These DFSS tools are customized explicitly for Design Engineering use and the sequence is tailored to your company's New Product Development (NPD)Process.

Whatever your statistical software and Phase Gate or Stage-Gate process, we will adapt our DFSS training program to meet your needs worldwide. Our baseline approach of CDOC (Conceptualize-Design-Optimize-Control) gates has been customized to fit client needs using many different roadmap approaches. So whether your design culture is DMADV, CDOV, IDOV, DMAIC, or something else, we have the consulting experience and DFSS training capabilities to meet your business needs. Our experience includes DFSS in Medical Devices, Food Products, Glass Products, Aluminum Products, Paper Products, Automotive and Engine products, HVAC products, Electrical Products, Cell Phone Products, and Chemical Products. A good DFSS Master Black Belt (MBB) can follow a roadmap and train to a curriculum. At SBTI you will find senior-level experienced DFSS consultants that know your industry and can make the critical difference between training and top-line growth a reality.

DFSS & Innovation:

Innovation may be found in any human endeavor where there is no defined path from start to finish. These include new product or process development, development of new systems, including information technology (IT Systems), new technology development, new services creation and development, and usually as a step in nearly all problem solving approaches. These include DMAIC Operations and Transactional Six Sigma, Plan-Do-Check-Act or PDCA cycles, and other quality improvement and process improvement methods like the Ford 8D problem solving approach.

The focus of the SBTI Design for Six Sigma training program begins with marrying the "Voice of the Business" with the "Voice of the Customers". Our 19 step Concept Development or VOC process is aimed at creating truly innovative, breakthrough products that meet and exceed your customer's stated and unstated needs. Once true customer needs are obtained, design engineering personnel progress toward understanding and characterizing critical design parameters and functionality. Innovation begins with the sparks created by understanding customer needs, and then proceeding to define value in the customer's eyes. Only then can value-added innovation occur. From Brainstorming through Categorical Exploration and Solutions Research, innovation will be focused upon addressing customer needs and increasing value in the marketplace. SBTI's clients agree that we offer the most complete and fully rounded Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) training program for corporations concerned with the future of new product designs. If you want to make double digit top-line growth a reality, please contact SBTI for more information about our Design For Six Sigma Training Programs and DFSS Consulting capabilities.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) - Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and Continuous Flow Products Focus

Continuous Flow Products are very different than assembled products, and this is especially true in product development. Your DFSS deployment must take this into account. The SBTI world-class Chemical DFSS (CDFSS) training program has been tailored to meet the unique needs and challenges found in developing chemical, pharmaceutical, food manufacturing and other continuous flow products. Already employed by leading companies as Ashland, Celanese, Certainteed, BASF and others, breakthroughs are possible in your new continuous flow products. Solutions are not simple, but they can be effectively found with the Design for Six Sigma - Chemical training program. You will only find DFSS consultants with Chemical Process experience teaching this training program. With support from SBTI, DFSS trained Six Sigma Green Belts and Black Belts will deploy supervised DFSS projects that focus on innovation and quantitative results.

Transactional Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) - Process & Service Design

Many of the tools and techniques of DFSS apply to process and service design, and quite a few do not. SBTI's Six Sigma Process Design (SSPD) training program or Service DFSS has combined the key tools and methods from DMAIC and DFSS to form a unique 5-day program aimed solely at Service and Process Design, sometimes called Transactional DFSS. The program has a pre-requisite of Green Belt or Black Belt with transactional focus. For more on this unique Service Design training program, please see our resource library, or to hear about it in our podcast.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Links

Software Design (DFSS) with PS&J

Service & Process Design (SSPD or Transactional DFSS)

Critical Parameter Management Software for DFSS (Cognition)

DFSS Enterprise Project Management:

Instantis,

PowerSteering

Monte Carlo Simulation tool for Design for Six Sigma (Crystal Ball),

Process Simulation with IGrafx

DFSS Tools & Methods Software:

QFD & TRIZ for Design with IdeaCore,

Design for Reliability Tools by Relex,

DFSS Tolerance Modeling with VarTran

DFSS & Innovation Related Societies & Meeting Places:

ISixSigma,

IEEE, ASME, International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)

Society of Reliability Engineers,

ISSSP

Six Sigma Forum

Real Innovation, a free information resource

Other Useful Links and Information:

Engineering Statistics Handbook

The Patent Cafe

US Statistics Information
Global Statistics Information