HOW SIX SIGMA CAN SUPERCHARGE YOUR BUSINESS?

As we build businesses, we strive to make them successful in what they do and efficient in the way they carry that out.

Six Sigma is a framework with dual American and Japanese origins which helps companies achieve both of these aims. Six Sigma, after all, is not just about improving processes but improving organizations.

We want to take company processes and make them better, smoother, faster, easier it’s what Process Street does. But having a complex process optimized to the highest degree, as Six Sigma advocates, is tough.

In this article I try my best to convince the concepts as simple as possible

We’ll look at:

• What is Six Sigma?
• What is Design for Six Sigma?
• What is DMADV?
• What is the difference between DMAIC and DFSS

We’ll run through the best practices of creating new products and processes in a way that they can be improved and optimized from the very beginning.

Don’t waste your time with poor processes. Start right and continue properly.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is an approach to process improvement which grew out of the production systems of electronics company Motorola. The engineer Bill Smith is credited with implementing Six Sigma ideas and refining its core techniques and tools during his time with the company.

The core concept behind Six Sigma is to hone a production system to reduce defects.

Defects occur all the time in various forms of production and our search for efficiency or quality is reliant on our ability to reduce the frequency of these defects.

The maturity, or effectiveness, of a production process, can be measured in terms of a sigma rating. The higher the yield lower the defects the higher the sigma rating.

When we talk in terms of Six Sigma we’re referring to how many defects per million products occur in a production line. To achieve a Six Sigma production system you need to be defect-free at least 99.99966% of the time at each defect opportunity. That means only 3.4 defective features per million defect opportunities.

What is the DMAIC process?

The traditional approach is referred to as the DMAIC process.

The DMAIC process stands for:

1. Define
2. Measure
3. Analyze
4. Improve
5. Control

DMAIC is a data-driven improvement cycle designed to be applied to business processes to find flaws or inefficiencies – particularly resulting in output defects – and to combat them. The goal of employing DMAIC is to improve, optimize, or stabilize existing processes.

The DMAIC process is everything we associate with Six Sigma. It is based on data and stats, using math to find problems within our operations in order that we can improve.

The process is a cycle in that once you finish the process, you’ll likely just start it all over again. This kind of emphasis on continual improvement shares a lot with similar methodologies and approaches like the Toyota Production System.

Most of these methodologies overlap considerably as they continue to learn from each other and iterate their own theories.

What is Design for Six Sigma?

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is an approach that enables you to design a new process in a data-driven way so that you can strive to meet Six Sigma's performance. DFSS is centered around business or customer needs rather than around the performance data of existing processes.

There are two popular approaches to DFSS: DMADV and IDOV.

I apologize for all of these acronyms. They’re terrible to read and I know that.

DMADV is the process that people generally refer to when they talk about Design for Six Sigma; the two terms are sometimes used synonymously.

When might I use DFSS?

To put DFSS into context, we could look at the process of designing an outbound sales process.

Now, not being a manufacturing process, it’s kind of hard to go about implementing Six Sigma into an area of business with generally high failure rates. But this is illustrative and intended to be friendly for readers outside the world of manufacturing. So cut me some slack, yeah?

Imagine we’re running a pretty decent mid-sized company and we want to launch a sales team to do outbound sales. We’ve toyed around with outbound sales enough previously to know it is an effective channel, but we don’t have set processes in place.

What do we do?

When creating a sales process in line with Six Sigma ideas, we could think about two main things:

• What does the end customer want?
• What opportunities will exist where a potential client is lost? (a defect opportunity)

Firstly, we would want to demonstrate that there is a need for this new outbound process and communicate that need to the rest of the organization. Once they’re on board, we’ll need to leverage their assistance where necessary and map our design process so they know what we think we’re going to get completed when.

What is DMADV?

It has to be understood that DFSS isn’t a lean methodology.

In DFSS, you put in extra work and planning beforehand in order to make the first iteration of a product or process as good as it can be.

Quality One describes it as follows:

Multiple redesigns of a product are expensive and wasteful. It would be much more beneficial if the product met the actual needs and expectations of the customer, with a higher level of product quality the first time. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) focuses on performing additional work upfront to assure you fully understand the customer’s needs and expectations prior to design completion.

We advocate for lean approaches a lot at Process Street, but if you already have a solid customer base you don’t want to deliver them an MVP with all its limitations and rough edges. You want to start with quality and then iterate to a better product as time goes on.

The DMADV process is how these needs are met and how the product quality is delivered.

DMADV isn’t just about process design in the abstract, it is an organizational tool to use to assist different stakeholders within a company to come together to successfully complete the process design.

Six Sigma, after all, is not just about improving processes but improving organizations.

Define how you’re going to conduct your investigation:

In this section, you need to work out how you’re going to approach the challenge.

This will likely involve about 7 key considerations:

• Work out who your customer is. You need to know whom you’re trying to develop this process for and why. If it’s an internal process then which team counts as your customer? If this is an external process then which actual customer is the customer in the context of this design process? Be specific.
• Develop problem and goal statements. We want to know why you’re initiating this process. What kind of pain points are being experienced to justify these efforts? How long have these pain points been felt? Develop a goal statement that is SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
• Assemble your crack team. Define what roles are going to be had across your team for this research effort. Who is the Process Owner, the Champion, the Black Belt, or the Green Belts? And which one of you is Donatello? Your team should have experience and knowledge from across the company; a varied skill set will help when facing new or unexpected challenges. Define a communication plan for how this team will work together.
• Define your available resources. For one, do not design a production process that requires space the business doesn’t have unless there’s clear evidence that building another factory will be well worth the money. You have to work within your means. Moreover, you shouldn’t spend $1m on designing a new process if your goal is to save the company $500,000 by replacing a process. You can do a risk assessment here too to factor in different scenarios.
• Write up your Business case. This should be a document that clearly outlines why this process design is important. Try to include these 7 points:
• Why is the project worth doing? Justify the resources necessary to engage in the project.
• Why is it important to customers?
• Why is it important to the business?
• Why is it important to employees?
• Why is it important to do it now?
• What are the consequences of not doing the project now?
• How does it fit with the operational initiatives and targets?
• Get some milestones on the board. Develop a project plan that’s well broken down with detail on the timeframe, spend, and required resources/external involvement throughout the project so that you can present this as your expected performance going forward.
• Demonstrate how your research and design process will operate via a process map. A process map is a simple way to convey narratively the different workflows involved in conducting your experiments, research, and designs. Plus all the other things you’re going to have to do while carrying out this DFSS project. See our nice illustrative graphic below.

Your customer needs and wants may not be obvious. Through research and careful analysis you may be able to discover a greater truth about the market which can unleash your company’s potential.

Tools for this investigation include:

• Customer surveys
• Structured interviews
• Open format focus groups
• Historical data
• Current market trends analysis
• Immersion into customer experiences