What is DFSS and How does Quality during Design Relate?

We explore the history, philosophy, and methodology of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS). We dissect the acronyms DMAIC and DMADV, revealing how these methodologies are blueprints for achieving excellence.  From statistics to Motorola's legendary quality standards and other history of six sigma, you'll begin to see how DFSS may relate with your organization's current design development processes.

Quality during Design is not DFSS. It can be part of DFSS or any other product development process. Quality during Design is a philosophy that emphasizes the benefits of cross-functional team involvement and a methodology that uses quality tools to refine design concepts early on. Quality tools bridge the gap between team communication and innovative concept development. We review why skipping the crucial steps of questioning and investigating can lead to missed opportunities. 

As we navigate through the essential stages of product development, we invite you to join us on this enlightening path to creating impactful and high-quality solutions that stand the test of time—and the marketplace.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

Transcript

Understanding Design for Six Sigma Philosophy

Speaker 1 0:00

Design for Six Sigma. What is it and how does it differ from quality during design? Let's study design for Six Sigma in this episode so we can understand a little more about it and how it fits into our current design control processes or design development processes. We'll look at its historical context, how it came to be developed into a philosophy and a methodology, and how quality during design differs and what some of the similarities may be. Let's talk more about design for Six Sigma versus quality during design after this brief introduction. Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less.

Speaker 1 0:49

I'm your host, diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals and how to apply quality during design to their processes, and coach individuals in how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom.

Speaker 1 1:18

I remember my first impression of the Six Sigma methodology was that it included a lot of acronyms. It was also somehow related to statistics, but then again, the methods that were related to the acronyms weren't really associated with the statistics part of it. So let's talk about Six Sigma what it is, and to really understand Six Sigma we need to look at some of the historical context of how it came to be. Some historical accounts trace Six Sigma back to the cotton gin and the Ford motor companies, but we don't really need to go to that extreme right. That was really the start of the Industrial Revolution, where we started mass production and looking at reducing defects in the production process. I think that's why those historical accounts go back so far, because it was the introduction of those kind of concepts and our modern manufacturing methods. The term Six Sigma itself was coined by an engineer that worked for Motorola. We associate Six Sigma ideas with Motorola because in 1988, motorola was awarded a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This award is something that is voluntarily applied for. You need to submit some paperwork to a review board and then people from the board come and visit your facility, talk with you about your submission and interview you and your staff, and then award is presented to your company if you had the best practices, the best improvement. It's really a measurement of excellence in quality, management and performance. Motorola submitted an application to win this award and in 1988, like I said, they won the award. The award was based off of the Six Sigma methodology. We know about Six Sigma and the Motorola methodology because one of the conditions of this award is to share what it is you did to achieve this excellence in quality, management and performance. So Motorola did the work applied to win this award, won the award, published what it is they did and this is how we know about Six Sigma.

Speaker 1 3:38

Six Sigma is really about the quality levels of whatever it is you're producing, right? We want to reduce the causes of defects and minimize the variability in what it is you're producing. From a statistical point of view, we want to produce results. So that could be if we're manufacturing widgets or if we're looking at a business process. We want to produce results that are within six sigma or six standard deviations from the mean. I visualize it like a bell curve, because if we're analyzing a process that is in control and capable, it's going to have a normal shaped bell curve, a textbook case okay. And Six Sigma, 99.99% of the products that you produce or the results that your process produce, is going to be without defects. That is a high standard of quality to have 99.99% of your products without defects. That's just the statistical version of the story. Really, six Sigma has evolved into a philosophy or a goal or a vision, and it has its own methodology to achieve these high levels of quality. Overall, people use Six Sigma philosophies to improve management and quality within organizations.

Speaker 1 5:10

Now let's get into some of the acronyms that are part of the Six Sigma methodology. Dmaic is one for processes and DMADV is associated with DFSS. Let's break this down a little bit. Dmadv is a design for Six Sigma. That's what the DFSS stands for. Both of these cases, the DMAIC and the DMADV, are the Six Sigma methodologies to reduce variation and eliminate defects in our activities. Something that I like to keep in mind with all of these kind of continuous improvement or development cycles is that they're all loosely tied to the scientific method. That kind of helps me to keep things straight in my head as I'm reviewing or acting on these kind of processes. That might help you too. Let me describe these acronyms a little bit more and compare and contrast them.

Speaker 1 6:14

We have DMAIC, which is define, measure, analyze, improve and control. It is meant for continuous improvement projects, where we're measuring a process and making continuous improvements on it. We're improving something that already exists. Dmaic is considered more linear than some of the other quality continuous improvement cycles like PDCA or PDSA cycles. When quality practitioners use the PDCA cycles, they're thinking of making minor improvements continuously over time, cycling through different improvements to continuously improve. Whatever it is we're doing, dmaic is intended, or is most used for bigger projects, where we want to do more upfront planning, investigation and analysis for a big project than we would for maybe a smaller continuous improvement project. So that is Six Sigma's methodology for improving a process is DMAIC. You could use this for your manufacturing process. You could use this for your manufacturing process, your business process, your services processes. It can be used for all of those kind of processes.

Speaker 1 7:43

Dmadv is a methodology for design. For Six Sigma it stands for define, measure, analyze, design and verify. If you notice, the first three of DMA IC and DMA DV are the same Define, measure, analyze. In our case, now we're going to design something and then validate that design. Dma DV is a methodology used for the development of new products or services. We're not improving anything. We're developing something new. Instead of measuring a process, it's measuring customer inputs.

Speaker 1 8:28

Let's step through the Design for Six Sigma acronym in a little more detail. For the first D, for define, we're really defining our design goals? What are our project goals? What is it that we're trying to develop? What are the customer needs? What is the scope and deliverables for this project? That is part of the define stage of this methodology. In the measure phase, we want to identify and measure characteristics that are critical to quality, or we're collecting data and understanding our customer needs, finding unstated needs, investigating the competitor products. We're measuring and collecting all of this data so that we can do our next step, which is the analyze, where we're going to analyze the data to find the best possible design. We'll be exploring options, performing risk analyses, making decisions about what our design is going to be.

Speaker 1 9:32

The second D of our DMA-DV is for the design. It's really the design process and if you're a designer, you know it's an iterative process. We're taking design inputs and designing it and then building and iterating ideas, doing prototypes, doing our design. Finally, the last letter of our acronym here is V for verify, where we want to verify that what we've designed, our design outputs, is going to meet our design inputs, and we also want to validate the real use of our design. Take a moment and consider your current design development process. How does it follow with design for Six Sigma. It's probably similar or it has similar steps. Your design process may be more integrated into your company's quality management system. You may have phase gates or particular times that you need to do a design review, but your product design process that you're following probably follows a lot of the DMA-DV methodology Now with quality during design, the kind of things that I'm promoting with bringing quality and reliability earlier in the design phase of new product development.

Speaker 1 10:55

How does this compare with design for Six Sigma, this methodology that we just talked about? It really fits into the measure and analyze phases of design for Six Sigma. In the measure phase we're figuring out what it is we want to measure to determine if we reach success. It involves identifying requirements and other design inputs and in analyze it's about translating the requirements into design features and prioritizing them. And those are the two areas of design where quality during design fits about figuring out what's important to the customer in defining requirements and design inputs and then translating those requirements into design features and prioritizing them. Quality during design is about facilitating cross-functional discussions with the engineering and design group about the use, space and design concepts and then iterating on those findings later in development to develop more ideas or to get better answers and information so that other trade-off and design decisions can be more easily made. The quality during design tools can be integrated into any design control process. Does it matter if you're following design for Six Sigma or if you're following your own phase gate system or if you're using a completely design development process. It will fit into whatever it is you're using today.

Speaker 1 12:38

Quality during design is also a philosophy and a methodology. The philosophy is that we can engineer products better when we involve the cross-functional team and we use quality tools to develop design concepts before we start engineering products. If you look through the podcast blog on qualityduringdesigncom, you'll see that I've had blog posts and episodes about many of the tools that are used in design for Six Sigma. These are things like quality function deployment, what it is and how you can use it, even if you don't practice that in your company. Trees, dfx or design for excellence, design of experiments, taguchi methods and other tolerance design methods. These are all quality methods that we can use in design to help us iterate on things that we're developing and designing. They're not necessarily the type of quality tools that we can use in design to help us iterate on things that we're developing and designing. They're not necessarily the type of quality tools that we use to break down silos within our company and to communicate concept ideas before we've even started designing or engineering things.

Speaker 1 13:45

Quality during design is about using quality tools in a team setting for engineers to better understand and develop design concepts. It's staying in the problem space a little bit longer. We may have already identified a customer need or a gap that we need to fill, but now we want to stay in the questioning and investigating part of the problem space a little bit longer with our team so that we best understand the design inputs that we're using into benefits, symptoms and a use process to be able to develop concepts before we start engineering design. After we've developed concepts and design ideas, we can iterate on some of the things that we used for concept development to be able to help us with later design processes. The later design is where we are designing and prototyping. That's where we are sitting in the solution space. That's where a lot of these other tools can help us. Matrices, like a house of quality, might be able to help us link requirements to our customer needs. Fmea can help us in the solution space. We can use what we've developed in concept to help us start in analyzing important parts of our FMEA, defining what scope of risk we need to look at. So that's where quality during design can fit with design for Six Sigma in the measure and analyze phases.

Speaker 1 15:29

But you don't have to practice Design for Six Sigma in order to use Quality During Design.

Speaker 1 15:36

Quality tools are meant to be team tools and activities to help us communicate with each other, and that's the focus of Quality During Design and that's the focus of quality during design. What's today's insight to action? Consider your design development process. How does it relate with design for Six Sigma? How are you communicating concepts and developing concepts with your team? Are you doing it right now or is it something that you skip?

Speaker 1 16:12

When you're looking at the problem space, are you only identifying the needs and the gaps and the potential product idea and then jumping into a solution space where you start to design a solution, or are you stopping and developing concepts with your team as part of the problem space? Are you working with your team to question and investigate the use space and the concept ideas with your team before you start engineering solutions? If not, consider using some of the quality tools that we review at Quality During Design, to help you communicate those ideas and develop those concepts with your team. If you'd like to continue to learn more, please visit the website and sign up for the newsletter. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening. Thank you.