Six Sigma methods cannot repair defective requirements or inherently defective designs.

DFSS initiatives overcome this limitation by focusing on the development

of new products and processes. By incorporating DFSS tools into product
development projects, companies can invent, develop, and launch new
products that exceed customer requirements for performance, quality, reliability,
and cost. By selecting Critical To Quality characteristics (CTQs)
based on customer requirements, and by focusing development activity on
those CTQs, DFSS closes the defect gap. When DFSS works well, features
measured and controlled by the supplier are the ones most important to the
customer.

Just as DMAIC provides a roadmap for Six Sigma teams, DFSS teams also
need a roadmap to guide their progress through each project. A very effective DFSS roadmap
includes these five phases: Plan, Identify, Design,
Optimize, and Validate, or PIDOV. Here is a brief description of each phase
in the roadmap.

Phase 1: Plan In this phase, the DFSS leadership team develops goals
and metrics for the project, based on the VOC. Management makes
critical decisions about which ideas they will develop and how they
will structure the projects. Cooper, Edgett, and Kleinschmidt (2001)
describe best practices for this task in their book Portfolio Management
for New Products. Once the management team defines projects, each
requires a charter, which clearly specifies objectives, stakeholders, and
risks. A business case justifies the project return on investment (ROI).
The team reviews lessons learned from earlier projects and gains management
approval to proceed.

Phase 2: Identify The primary objective of this phase is to identify

the product concept which best satisfies the VOC. The team identifies
which system characteristics are Critical To Quality (CTQ). The
design process will focus greater attention and effort on the CTQs, to
assure customer satisfaction. Success in this phase requires much
more investigation of the VOC, using a variety of well-established
tools. Since most of these tools are not statistical, they are outside
the scope of this book. Mello (2002) presents the best tools available
for defining customer requirements during this “fuzzy front end” of
the project.

Phase 3: Design During this phase, with clear and accurate requirements,
engineers do what they do best, which is to design the new product and
process. Deliverables in a DFSS project go beyond the usual drawings
and specifications. Focusing on CTQs, engineers develop transfer
functions, such as Y_ f (X), which relate low-level characteristics Xto
system-level characteristics Y. Through experiments and tolerance
design, the team determines which components X are CTQs and how to
set their tolerances. In this phase, statistical tools are vital to make the
best use of scarce data and to predict future product performance with
precision.

Phase 4: Optimize In this phase, the team achieves balance between

quality and cost. This balance is not a natural state, and it requires effort
to achieve. Invariably, when teams apply DFSS tools to measure the
quality levels of characteristics in their design, they find that some have
poor quality, while others have quality far better than required. Both
cases are off balance and require correction. During this phase, the team
applies statistical methods to find ways to make the product and process
more robust and less sensitive to variation. Often, teams find ways to
improve robustness at no added cost.
Phase 5: Validate During this phase, the team collects data from prototypes
to verify their predictions from earlier phases. The team also
validates the customer requirements through appropriate testing. To
assure that the product and process will always maintain balance between
quality and cost, the team implements statistical process control methods
on all CTQs.