PDSS President Skip Creveling's next book, whose working title is FutureSigma, was partly inspired by a controversial article about Six Sigma at 3M that appeared in the June 11, 2007 issue of Business Week called "At 3M, a Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity" by Brian Hindo. The entire article can be read on Business Week's website at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm

Based on Skip's two year engagement at 3M during their adoption of DFSS, this book excerpt addresses one of the article author's points.

Brian Hindo states in the article, "[CEO] McNerney introduced the two main Six Sigma tools. The first and more traditional version is an acronym known as DMAIC [whose] five steps are the essence of the Six Sigma approach to problem solving. The other flavor is called Design for Six Sigma, or DFSS, which purports to systematize a new product development process so that something can be made to Six Sigma quality from the start."

Actually, McNerney introduced DFSS to accelerate growth, not make things "to Six Sigma quality from the start". 3M wanted to increase the number of viable product development projects that had an excellent match between market pull and technology push. Why? So people would buy a lot of them and get 3M out of the "make a little -sell a little" paradigm they had practiced due to their conservative culture. I might add - they operated under that conservative paradigm long before Six Sigma was ever considered at 3M. That happened over the 100+ year history of the company - even across the halcyon days of free-form innovation before anyone was interrupted by a green belt project!

Everything done at 3M within DFSS for improved product development was to support McNerney's publicly stated growth strategy which was called 2X-3X. What is 2X-3X? As published on 3M's website, it was McNerney's strategy for accelerating growth at the top line. It was based on the need for more balance between marketing data and technology data as 3M evaluated and selected growth projects. McNerney's 2X-3X strategy was a unique twist on the 10X approach to improving all key enterprise results.

At the front-end of the product development process, where technology innovation is available for application, the "2X" in the strategy called for "Twice as many projects that were data-proven to be in alignment with real market needs, that were able to win in a competitive environment and were worth doing in comparison with other opportunities at 3M's disposal for financial investment in growth". McNerney insisted on all growth projects passing a "real-win-worth" hurdle before investment was made in activating the idea as a DFSS-enabled product development project.

At the other end of the product development pipe-line, the "3X" in the strategy was "Three times the return that would have normally been created by past, new product launches".  This meant that 3M could potentially do fewer growth projects if they chose, weeding out low-value projects that historically proved to waste limited time and resources. It is this process that some former 3M scientists claim would have never let Post-it notes happen. McNerney disagreed and he said so publicly in the local press at the time.

This enabled better focus on the projects they chose to do in an attempt to return three times the revenue they were historically getting from a new product. DFSS was the enhancement that would bring data credibility for growth through new product development. Not the usual form of DFSS, where engineers focused on reducing the unwanted effects of variability during the technical design of a product. This was a new form of DFSS that would concurrently produce robust products as well as robust business cases and market attack plans, price models, sales forecasts and efficient launches of product. The products were based on 3M innovations that were being pulled out of the company at the command of the "voice of the customer", rather than at the push of the "voice of technologists".

How was DFSS received by the employees? People at 3M clamored to get into the DFSS program. They wanted to do it. I have found that if you explain what DFSS really does, the vast majority of marketing and technical professionals want to learn how to apply it. Few run screaming in the other direction.