In last month's article (June 2010), we discussed how to mitigate the risks associated with a high-risk, high-reward, beat-the-market Fast Track commercialization project. The major factors were 1) using stable, tunable robust technology in the product and 2) having an excellent post-launch DMAIC team standing by. This article, excerpted from Chapter 7 of Skip Creveling's book, Six Sigma for Technical Processes, will outline the bare minimum tool-task groups to mitigate risks for each phase of the development process.

 

This article assumes a generic development process with four phases, with the acronym of CDOV, standing for Concept, Design, Optimize and Verify. The CDOV process is explained in detail in Chapter 6 of the same book. Keep in mind throughout that the project must remain focused on the critical needs, requirements and functions that are NUD--that is, new, unique and difficult, and which make the project worth doing in the first place.

 

 

1.  Solicit and document customer needs data from your marketing and sales experts. Tap into their best field experience and judgment on customer needs. Consider them surrogates for true Voice-of-the Customer (VOC). Apply KJ methods to structure, rank, and prioritize the resulting data. Then check back with a few key customers to be sure their latest needs are being reasonably represented.

 

2.  Document the characteristics of the best product in the market that you know from your internal opinion. What will present the biggest threat to your new product? This is in lieu of benchmarking, with no actual tear-downs or in-depth analysis of various competitive products.

 

3.  Use KJ methods and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to process the customer needs into product technical requirements. Check back with the same few key customers to be sure the technical requirements are aligned with the NUD customer needs.

 

4.  Document at least two alternative concepts to compare against the one best product you are going up against. Use the NUD requirements from the House of Quality to help establish concept evaluation and selection criteria.

 

5.  Select the better of the two concepts and refine it to establish the most competitive concept possible to go up against your competitive benchmark. If time permits, blend synergistic attributes from both concepts. Confirm the results again with the few key customers.

 

6.  Conduct a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) on the NUD functions within your selected product concept to characterize risk.

 

 

1.  Document and prove the stability of the functional performance inside the subsystems and subassemblies of the product, especially those influenced by new technologies or materials. Stability for each critical sublevel function is documented and proven via the statistical process control (SPC) chart known as the Individuals and Moving Range Chart (I-MR Chart).

 

2.  Document Cp and Cpk values for critical sublevel functions. The focus is on nonstressed performance; nominal conditions where there are only random sources on noninduced variation active in the data. Capability studies are required for all NUD functions in the sublevel designs.

 

3.  Document the one critical adjustment parameter (CAP) proven to have a statistically significant effect on shifting the mean of each critical functional response in each sublevel design. In a non-Fast Track project, additional significant CAP's would be defined, rather than just one dominant CAP. Spend only enough time for one simple regression model to nail down one critical X for tuning the mean performance on the desired target; you are not building a comprehensive Y as a function of multiple X's.

 

4.  Finally, perform a design FMEA to update risk for the NUD functions that made the design worth doing from the customer's perspective.

 

 

1.  Conduct limited stress tests on the customer-critical subsystems and subassemblies. This will flush out sensitivities that can be rapidly identified and fixed. At least one round of robustness screening, but as many as can be afforded, should be done. The more work done here, the easier will be the system integration and final product verification. The goal is to tame the standard deviation during intentionally induced stress evaluations.

 

2.  Conduct a limited system-integration stress test to flush out sensitivities that can be rapidly identified and balanced. You won't get them all, but you'll get the really bad ones out of the way, depending on how much stress you choose to induce.

 

3.  Document failure modes for the latest data so the DMAIC team can see emerging risk trends and tasks you did not complete. They must structure their project plan to fill those gaps.

 

4.  Conduct process FMEA to identify risk in the relationships between design functions and process functions that make the parts and materials that will affect the design performance, fit and finish Cp and Cpk values.

 

 

1.  Conduct tolerance-balancing analysis and designed experiments to complete the specifications for the NUD functions most important to customers.

 

2.  Conduct capability studies at the system level to identify integrated performance. The DMAIC team will need this data to begin improvement projects on the weak areas across the system.

 

3.  Conduct reliability assessments. Document failure modes so the DMAIC team can see emerging risk trends from the tasks you did not complete. The DMAIC team must be prepared to fill the gaps.

 

 

Boiling this all down, in a Fast Track project, you can truncate the tasks to a bare minimum that is totally documented by critical parameter management for just the NUD requirements and functions. The post-launch team will deal with the interaction of the NUD functions and the easy, common and old (ECO) functions. If you get the dominant sensitivities under control for the NUD functions, you minimize the damage of poor performance across the items that the customer values. The DMAIC team will have to quickly clean up the remaining sensitivities and reliability issues.

 

Choose--or better yet, design--your problems wisely and proactively; be sure your DMAIC team is well aware of its role in the Fast Track project and plan for the best!

 

 

Do you have a Fast Track story to tell? Let us know if you have any words of wisdom to add! Simply reply-to this email. Thanks!

 

Business Manager and Newsletter Editor