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PDMA Houston Chapter – Lunch Meeting September 25, 2003
“Six Sigma and NPD – Friends or Foes?”
Speaker – John Jons
Well, just about everyone has heard about Six Sigma, usually as a Quality Improvement methodology. But have you heard about Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)? And what do either of these have to do with New Product Development? Are they tools we can use, or are they things that would get in the way? We have a thousand questions!!
Even if he didn’t have time for a thousand answers, John Jons did an excellent job of introducing Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma concepts to the audience at the PDMA Houston Chapter’s September 25 meeting. He illustrated where successful companies have found the greatest benefits from these tools and he suggested how they might be usefully employed in an NPD environment.
The original concept, Six Sigma, is a discipline put together from many Quality best practices and is intended to IMPROVE a function or a process and therefore, eventually, improve the company. In other words, it takes existing stuff and makes it better – often many orders of magnitude better. The newer Design for Six Sigma is intended to CREATE a high performing function or process where none previously existed. So it develops stuff – good quality stuff - from scratch.
This sounds like it might be of some use to us new product people and, obligingly, John illustrated one way in which we might consider a potential relationship between the two Six Sigma tools and our faithful Stage Gate development model.
Using Design for Six Sigma as a tool to promote productive creativity at the front end of the development process and then using Six Sigma improvement tools during the production phase could greatly benefit the final product.
So, Friends or Foes? The answer seems to be “Yes”!! It is another set of tools that a wise NPD professional will be aware of – and use when it is appropriate, and not when it is not. If you are interested in learning more about the subject, John recommends the reading material shown in the Bibliography below.
Thanks as always to Myra Caldwell and the Southwest Bank of Texas for hosting the event.
John Jons
John Jons is an independent consultant providing Organizational Development Consulting to Leadership Teams, focusing on achieving value-added results, faster than the competition. John has held senior level positions as a Corporate Organizational Development Consultant, a Corporate Six Sigma Expertise Center Performance and Training Leader, Manufacturing Quality and Quality Assurance Manager and Human Resources Division Head, at Fortune 100 companies. He has led or worked with teams to achieve major organizational changes and performance improvements, as measured by objective results, ranging from organizational startups, business revitalizations, high performance organization development, process consulting, new leadership and fast-track team building, to strategic human asset improvement planning and organizational culture alignment. John was on a team that won the Shingo Award for (Lean) Manufacturing Excellence. He is an American Society for Quality, Certified Quality Engineer and Auditor, and has published in the ASTD Journal and Training Magazine, and has presented at ASQ Symposiums.
Contact jvjons@earthlink.net
Editor: Reardon Smith – PDMA Houston Chapter, VP of Public Relations
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