Rath & Strong Blog

Is DFSS The Appropriate Response?

by David Hampton, Rath & Strong Management Consultants.

Over the past week, I have been asked by three different clients whether they should use DFSS.  I wonder if these conversations mean that there’s a mini-surge in interest in DFSS; when you read what I said, you might well wonder if these conversations just show that you can ask the same consultant the same question three different times, and get three different answers.  We’ll see…

The first one is in manufacturing, and making good progress attacking waste.  Some of the work is going on in individual sites, and some of it is whole end-to-end Supply Chain transformations.  They are working hard to address their cost issues and at the same time are developing their internal capability, continuing to improve process robustness and establishing a culture of continuous improvement by engaging all employees in problem-solving activities.  My answer to the DFSS question was that they should leave it for a few years yet and concentrate on the ongoing success of their Lean/Six Sigma efforts – don’t assume that the battle is won just because everything is going well; launching a new initiative now runs the risk of creating a ‘novelty factor’ that distracts management and forces your talented CI professionals to choose between switching their focus from LSS to DFSS and feeling left out of the next big thing.

The second one is in Financial Services, and they too have a successful program based heavily on Green Belt projects.  They sometimes find that processes (which are mostly for internal customers I should add) are so badly broken that they need to be redesigned.  In this case my answer is to keep it simple and stick with the DMAIC approach.  Once you have completed Define-Measure-Analyze you are pretty much the world’s expert in your problem process.  Where it is for an internal customer, whose needs are well understood by now, and the general shape of the process is well understood too, it’s usually sufficient to take what you have learned during the project so far as the basis for the process redesign. It’s fast, simple and doesn’t require any new tools or training.

The final one was in logistics.  They too have a successful program, using a mixture of Rapid Improvement Events and DMAIC projects.  But their challenge is that they have to create new processes for new B2B customers on a regular basis, and in the past this has taken too long and led to unpredictable results.  So in this case I said ‘go for it!’.  The customer-focused methodology of DFSS will ensure that they designed processes with their customers’ needs designed in, the stronger project management aspects will help ensure they launch on time and the use of tools such as QFD, Pugh Matrix and Design FMEA will help them to expand their thinking in both the sexy area of creativity and the unsexy area of risk avoidance.

I don’t think there’s a single right answer to the question of whether DFSS is appropriate.  It’s easy to just pigeon-hole it as the methodology of choice for process design.  In truth, the best approach has a lot more to do with circumstances, culture and customers.