August 2002
Volume 1 • Number 4
Contents
Straight Talk on DFSS
By Charles Huber, Corporate DFSS Leader, Seagate,
and Robert Launsby, President, Launsby Consulting
New product development is the lifeblood of most organizations. During the last decade, people working in product development have experienced incredible changes in the expectations of their design process.
An example from the computer disk drive industry is typical of what many experienced during product development (see “A Matter of Survival”).
Other industries are faced with similar competitive challenges when attempting to develop and produce products that are competitive in both price and technology and truly meet customer needs.
If all industries are considered, only about 60% of new products launched are a success. Additionally, about 45% of all resources allocated to new product development and commercialization are spent on products that are killed or fail to provide adequate financial return.1
Reasons for new product failures can be grouped into three primary categories:2
- Market research mistakes.
- Problems in design and production.
- Bad timing.
Understanding Your Customers
One big error organizations make is thinking, “We know what is best for our customers, and they will want what we develop.” This assumption is fine if you are on target. But a shift in what customers want can signal death to organizations relying on this market approach.
Other organizations try to understand customers but only make a feeble attempt or subcontract out market research to groups who far too often do not really understand the producer or the consumer. Constantly evolving or newly emerging requirements late in the design cycle are also huge hindrances to developing winning new products.
This is very much at the heart of new product problems frequently experienced by U.S. manufacturers of automobiles. Until leading automotive companies learn to proactively manage requirements, they will never be able to match the development cycles of Toyota.3
A Matter of Survival
In 1990, Digital Equipment Corp. was about to launch a new generation of computer disk drives into the marketplace. Code named the RA-90, it was the second largest development project ever undertaken by the company.
Several major technological innovations were to be simultaneously integrated into this state of the art (at the time) product. Key metrics associated with the product were:
- A product design cycle of five years (initiated in 1985).
- Price of $15,000 at the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) level.
- Storage capacity of one gigabyte of information (formatted).
- Mean time before failure of 40,000 hours.
Compared with today’s product, this seems like ancient technology. For example, key metrics of today’s disk drives are:
- Product design cycles of six months.
- Price at the OEM level of less than $100.
- Storage capacity of 60 or more gigabytes of information.
- Mean time before failure greater than 500,000 hours.
Unfortunately, because of product design glitches, the RA-90 launch was very late in coming to market. By the time enough glitches had been resolved to allow limited shipments, competitors had released enhanced technology drives at much lower prices. What could have been a huge win for this organization became a great failure. Coupled with other new product failures, this led to the ultimate breakup of the company. |
Design and production problems can be further broken into the following categories:
- Sheltered product issues.
- Manufacturing capability issues.
- Attempts to develop the perfect product.
A sheltered product works well only in labs for demonstrations to management or lead customers. Many products can be made to look good under limited operating ranges or only operate if constantly tweaked and tuned.
Too often products are totally designed before thought is given to sourcing or manufacturing. This frequently leads to the selection of volume processes that do not have the inherent capability to produce the part as designed.
In the military missile business, it is said some engineers would literally “hang on the side of the missile as it is being launched,” making last minute changes if allowed to. This need is usually the result of a late understanding of product requirements or attempts to make the product perfect.
Initiatives as large as design for Six Sigma (DFSS) will succeed only when accompanied by fundamental change in a several design related activities.
What DFSS Is
DFSS is a business process focused on improving profitability. Properly applied, it generates the right product at the right time at the right cost. Through its use of product and team scorecards, it is a powerful program management technique.
DFSS is an enhancement to your new product development process, not a replacement for it. A documented, well-understood and useful new product development process is fundamental to a successful DFSS program.
Your new product development process provides the roadmap to success. DFSS provides tools and teamwork to get the job done in an efficient and effective manner. By rigorously applying the tools of DFSS you can be assured of predictable product quality.
People frequently talk about DFSS as the logical extension of Six Sigma at the manufacturing and service level, called DMAIC, an acronym for define, measure, analyze, improve and control. This may be true, but it is important to realize the initiatives are tremendously different:
- The DMAIC process looks at existing processes and fixes problems, while DFSS focuses on the design of the product and process.
- DMAIC is more reactive, while DFSS is proactive.
- Dollar benefits obtained from DMAIC can be quantified rather quickly, while the benefits from DFSS are more difficult to quantify and tend to be much more long-term. It can take six to 12 months after the launch of the new product before you will obtain proper accounting on the impact of the DFSS initiative.
Roots of DFSS
DFSS has its roots in systems engineering. Much of the learning that underpins systems engineering evolved under the guidance of the Department of Defense and NASA. They developed a management approach that uses performance specifications, as opposed to volumes of product, subsystem, assembly, part and process specifications, to control the lifecycle process.
In the systems engineering world, management of requirements (for example, those aspects of the end product that must meet customer expectations) guides and drives the entire process.
Requirements at the senior or point of use level can then evolve through use of a variety of techniques generally described under the heading of requirements flow-down.
When statistical or quantitative methods are used to establish requirements between system performance and underlying inputs, the design process methodology transitions from a reactive, build and test mode to a predictive, balanced and optimized progression.
A GEMS’ Experience
General Electric’s Medical Systems Division (GEMS) led the way for DFSS application in the late 1990s with the introduction of the Lightspeed Computed Tomography System (CT). It was the first GE product to be completely designed and developed using DFSS.
Lightspeed revolutionized the capabilities of CT. It allowed doctors to capture multiple images of a patient’s anatomy simultaneously at a speed six times faster than traditional scanners. Doctors were able to scan more patients per shift and saw productivity double. Additionally, the images were more clear. The increased speed and image quality enabled doctors to more accurately treat patients while making decisions with greater confidence.
In 1999 Jack Welch, then chair and CEO of GE, announced all GE products designed after that time would be designed using the DFSS approach. Data storage and management companies Iomega and Seagate and other organizations also have corporate level initiatives focused on DFSS. |
DFSS provides a systematic integration of tools, methods, processes and team members throughout product and process design. Initiatives vary dramatically from company to company but typically start with a charter (linked to the organization’s strategic plan), an assessment of customer needs, functional analysis, identification of critical to quality characteristics, concept selection, detailed design of products and processes, and control plans.
The beginning of the process centers on discovery of customer wants and needs using tools such as concept engineering and quality function deployment (QFD). From this “fuzzy” front end, requirements take shape. Customer issues, competitive advances, technology roadmaps and disruptive influences co-mingle in a stew of uncertainty.
Traditionally, such a mixture of needs and conceptualizations could lead to doubt, creeping performance expectations and big problems with business results. But DFSS brings structure to the front end. No guarantees about market success are implied by the preceding statement, but a systematic and repeatable process is always better than notes on the backs of napkins or partially understood product expectations.
Giving focus to the translation of customer wants and needs into language that can drive the design process is essential.
When personal computer users indicate speed is important, how is this simple idea translated into actual performance measures? Is speed the rpm of the drive spindle? Or does speed mean reduced time to accept new data into a file? Or time to find a desired segment of data? Or, does speed mean the rate at which an amateur photographer can compose, edit, store and send the kid’s photos off to Grandma?
The answer is yes, but not always. DFSS methods highlight and resolve such dilemmas before design teams start detailed development. It eliminates ambiguity at the front end that can lead to chaos at the back.
Let’s suppose the front end is clean. You have resolved product performance issues, and a set of quantifiable and measurable specifications have materialized through agreement among marketing and development team members.
Predicting Design Behavior
DFSS now looks to predict how the designs under consideration will behave. Engineering and statistical methods provide the basis for prediction. QFD is a terrific tool and should be used in early phases of requirement flow-down. Obtaining the second or even third level in the house of quality matrix will always enhance engineers’ understanding of related factors.
However, and it’s a big however, engineers can’t use QFD to predict what might happen. Nor can QFD find out if factors are interdependent. In this phase of DFSS, engineers need to define relationships between desired response and critical dependent factors via transfer functions.
Transfer functions, models, simulations and fundamental physics can all play a role. Transfer functions can then enable engineers to inject variation into the models to understand how the distribution of variation can alter the desired performance. This allows you to predict what will happen in actual operation.
Predictions bring another critical element into the DFSS methodology: process, part and measurement variation. Pay dirt from deploying DFSS stems from analysis of the effect of variation before manufacturing begins. Such analysis leads to trade-offs between factors, balancing outputs to optimize overall performance while allowing you to rate risks associated with decisions about program status from a schedule, cost or profitability perspective.
Manufacturing process capability and design margin are no longer the seeds of internal conflict but rather two limbs on the same tree. Analysis of variability leads to rational decisions regarding whether to insist on design improvement, investment in new capital equipment or the launch of a massive process capability improvement using 50 Black Belts.
As with the fuzzy front end, rational decisions based on available data are always better than educated guesses or dependence on luck. Which would you choose?
So, what if the predictions are wrong? What if something unexpected happens? Technology companies know full well there are always unknown unknowns, or to quote Mikel Harry, co-founder of the Six Sigma Academy, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
What DFSS Does
DFSS provides a structured way to constructively use the information learned from such events in the next program. The message here is twofold:
- There are no guarantees, even with statistical methods.
- Learn from the present to become stronger in the future.
To reap the benefits of DFSS, an organization must make fundamental changes in the way it develops new products and processes. Ironically, while tremendous changes have taken place in common methodologies applied to improving manufacturing efficiencies (such as just in time, lean, statistical process control, design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA), many organizations still use 20-year-old fundamentals when scoping market requirements and designing a product and its processes.
Changes Required
For DFSS to be effectively implemented across development, an organization must make the following six major changes:
- Freeze requirements.
- Allocate additional resources early.
- Be aware it is all about deployment, not training.
- Develop product platforms.
- Have management guide and lead.
- Design simplicity.
Freeze requirements
Another example from the computer disk industry helps highlight why freezing requirements is important. In the early ’80s one of the authors of this article was a program manager for a flexible disk product line.
The technical requirements for the product were well-defined (dictated by the disk drive design). Unfortunately, the packaging and labeling requirements were not.
We had an extremely hard working market requirements person, who was really attempting to do a good job of understanding the marketplace. Every other week he would travel to another customer site and bring back a list of 50 to 70 unique packaging requests. At product reviews he would ask that these requirements be added to the product specification. This happened week after week.
Unfortunately, there was no prioritization of these requirements. Requests continued to be made late in the design effort. Eventually the design and manufacturing groups only paid lip service to the demands of marketing.
We would have had more success if the organization had worked hard to fully understand the customer’s requirements early in the design cycle. Tools exist to help organizations prioritize and fully understand the market of today (and tomorrow).
Unfortunately, even today this example is standard operating procedure in numerous organizations we are familiar with, and evolving requirements are a major barrier to effectively implementing DFSS.
Allocate Additional Resources Early
Companies must be smarter earlier in the design cycle to avoid design and manufacturing glitches at the pilot and launch stages. This demands:
- Giving thoughtful, early consideration to requirements.
- Selecting rugged design concepts.
- Identifying critical to quality characteristics.
- Generating transfer functions.
- Setting customer driven specifications at the systems, subsystem and process levels.
Many teams are not accustomed to doing all these things early on—or at all.
Additional resources will also need to be allocated to assure all the preceding things happen in a timely manner. How much additional resource will be required is dependent on how aggressively you are currently funding the early design stages. As a rule of thumb, 15 to 25% additional resources beyond your current funding level at the early design stages will need to be allocated. Wise allocation of these additional resources will provide a handsome payoff of minimal problems at pilot and launch.
Be Aware It Is All About Deployment, Not Training
Today, organizations are making a huge mistake in beginning training of the “masses” in a multitude of tools without a deployment plan. The transfer rate of classroom training to the new product and process design effort with this approach is poor.
“That was interesting. Now let’s go back and design the product the way we have historically done it” is the typical response of designers who attend this type of training. Some refer to this type of training as the “sheep dip” approach (immerse folks in the tools without reference to their application).
Better approaches are available. One is the just in time approach to training. Teach the design team about a DFSS tool just before the tool is used, then facilitate the application of the technique to the product being designed. The design team now sees the immediate applicability of the tool to the design effort.
Develop Product Platforms
Many organizations design products one at a time, giving little thought to succeeding generations of the product. Developing product platforms, however, can provide strategic advantage for an organization.
A product platform is a family of products that shares a common technology and addresses a related set of marketplace needs. Platforms are planned so several derivative products can be launched, generation after generation.
Books tend to be generated as platforms. If you compare various generations of a book, first and second editions will typically have a great deal of commonality. Software is also developed this way.
In fact, life is this way. The human genome project was dedicated to characterizing human genetic makeup. One of the startling discoveries was that the DNA of earthworms and humans is about 70% identical. With gorillas and humans, the likeness is approximately 99%.
Product platforms are not new, either. They allow companies to shorten time to market, provide greater flexibility, save money and react to market shifts more quickly. Product platforms are a key DFSS strategy.
Have Management Guide and Lead
Executives must do more than just “sign the check” and expect results. Management must provide both guidance and leadership for a change the magnitude of DFSS to happen. DFSS is a revolutionary approach to designing new products and processes, and such change will not happen on its own.
Unless the need for this type of change is defined and communicated effectively so every employee understands its benefit, DFSS experiences massive resistance. Management, therefore, needs to take the time to understand the tools and implications of DFSS, provide leadership, generate the vision, allocated necessary resources, monitor progress, communicate about the improvement model and demand and reward success.
Managers should take time to talk with the new product team members, particularly in the early phases of deployment. Most of us do what we believe our managers want us to do and what they reward. A new product team is no exception.
Design Simplicity
Back in the late 1980s, a new disk drive was really a new disk drive—down to the screws used as fasteners. In fact, the RA-90 was designed with 11 different screw types (after using design simplicity approaches, the number was reduced to three) to fasten the major subsystems to the base plate.
Thanks to the work of Geoffrey Boothroyd and Peter Dewhurst,4 companies have been able to make great strides in reducing costs and improving reliability. Design for assembly (one of the DFMA techniques) dictates manufacturing and manufacturing engineering be involved early in the new product development effort.
One key is to maximize ease of manufacturing by simplifying the design through part count reduction. Design complexity is an important metric that can be used as a benchmarking or baseline tool. It is a technique for comparing competitive designs (assuming both provide the same intended functions).
Complexity is computed as the cube root of X, where X is calculated as (the number of parts) x (number of part types) x (number of interfaces). Lower complexity is better. Lower complexity means lower cost, higher reliability and fewer opportunities for assembly errors. Lower complexity is another key DFSS tool that must be adopted by organizations.
Long-Term Success
For the majority of organizations, long-term success is tied directly to the new product development process. Tomorrow’s revenue and growth are tightly bound to how successful you are at launching new products.
DFSS can serve as a mechanism to revolutionize the way you develop new products. To reap its benefits, you must be prepared to make major changes.
The size of the effort is formidable, but the payoff may be no smaller than company survival.
REFERENCES
- Robert G. Cooper, Winning at New Products (Boston: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994).
- Ibid.
- “From the Nexus of Lexus,” BusinessWeek, Sept. 3, 2001, p. 23B.
- Geoffrey Boothroyd and Peter Dewhurst, Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1994).
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