Design for Six Sigma

Six Sigma is certainly a powerful approach for the improvement of business processes, either in service or manufacturing industries, and the DMAIC methodology is proving so effective that it has become the industry standard for quality improvement.
Lean and Six Sigma are integrated, providing tools and techniques to deal with the transactional and efficiency side of manufacturing. TRIZ, the theory of inventive problems solving, is also being integrated within Six Sigma to support the generation of more proactive ideas.


However the design of products and services remains a major challenge, and organisations still continue to propel new products to the market place without a solid guarantee of commercial success. Service by their nature and tradition have never been consciously designed at all!

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is an approach that extends the concept of Six Sigma process improvement to that of the design of new products and services, or the re-design of existing items, together with the meticulous design of the supporting processes that deliver these items to the market. Whilst many DFSS methodologies today promote rigorous engineering design with a stronger customer focus, many lack the vision and integration with a successful corporate processes for the introduction of the 'new'.

The company of tomorrow with a successful DFSS programme that extends from the board room down to the mail room and out to the customer will reap the rewards from the rapid development and introduction of products and service that excite the customer and deliver excellent sigma performance, right from the start.