Product Development Support

Design for Six Sigma

Design for Six Sigma is a comprehensive approach to product development that links business and consumer needs to critical product attributes to product functions to detailed designs to tests and verification. It integrates a full suite of analytical methods from Six Sigma and elsewhere, including Quality Function Deployment (QFD), goal deployment, Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), simulation, quality loss functions, prototyping and scorecards to create more reproducible, customer-driven designs faster.

Like Six Sigma, DFSS uses a structured set of steps (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify, for example) to ensure repeatability and continuous improvement. DFSS focuses on translating customer requirements qualitatively and quantitatively to product specifications (flowing them down) and then ensuring that proposed designs robustly meet customer-defined scorecards. GP's Operational Excellence Practice helps organizations modify and deploy DFSS tools for their specific applications and ensures that learning produces concrete improvments in meeting customer-defined product needs.