Design for Six Sigma: Launching New Products and Services without Failure

Citation

Narasimhan, K. (2002), "Design for Six Sigma: Launching New Products and Services without Failure", The TQM Magazine, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 264-265. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqmm.2002.14.4.264.2

Geoff Tennant is an independent management consultant specialising in strategy and Six Sigma. He has worked for three years as quality project manager in a European division of GE Capital, a finance division of General Electric, USA. Thus, he has direct experience of implementing Six Sigma quality principles and practices into a service industry.

Last year I reviewed his book that explored the underlying issues and elements of Six Sigma: What Is Six Sigma, the vision and benefit of Six Sigma, and implementing Six Sigma. This book is more focussed and concentrates on applying Six Sigma to the design and implementation of new products and services to fulfil customer needs and requirements.

The recent news about failures of new products and services introduced in the past few years demonstrate that the early stages of the launch of new products are often plagued with failure ranging from failure to deliver on time to failure to deliver at all. In the book The Six Sigma Way reviewed above, Pande et al., (2000) have demonstrated how Six Sigma design/redesign can result in dramatic improvement in performance. In this book Geoff Tennant describes the customer‐focussed Six Sigma approach required for the successful introduction of new products and services.

The book comprises ten chapters grouped into three parts. Part one entitled “Design and Six Sigma” comprises three chapters, Part two is about a design for Six Sigma methodology and comprises five chapters, and the final part comprising two chapters deals with practical issues. In chapter 1, Tennant provides an overview of Six Sigma: what it stands for, how design for Six Sigma (DFSS) has evolved, and how the application of customer‐focused design of new products/services can help achieve greater success in the era of globalisation and liberalisation.

In chapter 2, Tennant proposes a new comprehensive definition of design as:

The assembly of known entities or concepts into a composite whole, leading to a new entity of value and so as to maximize such value across a wide range of criteria.

And then provides brief explanations of the nature of design, seven critical elements of good design, the five key ingredients for successful design, and the seven significant contributions that a good design makes towards product and service success at all stages of the life cycle. He points out that the normal design cycle of design, build, use and evaluate is a poor one and can leave costly issues for the future. Hence, to anticipate and eliminate problems early by using DFSS, requires an improved design cycle. This improved cycle is achieved by shifting the starting point to first learning by example, then testing a concept against business and customer needs, evaluating the design against quality metrics, then piloting prototypes, etc., to ensure that hindsight becomes foresight.

Chapter 3 deals with how Six Sigma design has to become part of a strategy for realizing cost savings as well as successfully bringing new product/service to the market by focussing on customers and using technology to introduce new products with higher added value.

In chapter 4 an overview of the DFSS framework is given before dealing with the methodology in detail in chapter 5. Criteria for selecting projects and the application of quality function deployment (or house of quality) for focussing on customers and matching customer requirements with the technical capabilities are briefly explained. Also covered are issues pertinent to service design.

In the next three chapters Tennant explains the three broad areas necessary for improving the effectiveness of commercial design. The areas covered in some depth are using needs analysis to understand customers’ needs and preferences, listening to customer complaints and segmenting the customers; verifying the creative designs against the sigma metric; and reducing the risk of failure.

In chapter 9, Tennant points out that the real challenge of DFSS is not in the application of the tools but in adapting the methodology to fit the industry. Briefly covers aspects of integrating DFSS with other approaches such as the ISO 9000 and excellence models. Chapter 10, a very short chapter, deals with issues connected with managing project teams. In concluding he points out that DFSS is a collection of complex concepts and tools, perhaps seemingly rather disjointed, and hence may be potentially confusing.

As the reviewer has read other books on Six Sigma, it was not so confusing. However, a first time reader may have to scan the book a couple of times or read the summary of the chapters before venturing to read the book in detail. Such a step may help in overcoming the potential confusion Tennant mentions.

The text is well written and easy to read. A summary of the key points covered in a chapter is given at the end of the chapter. The first eight chapters also contain exercises for practical engagement to consolidate learning and understanding. The book should be useful for quality professionals, senior management and directors, as well as practitioners.