This is the conclusion of Dave Roy’s guest blog, we hope you have found them informative. Again, Dave comes to us from SSPI, Six Sigma Professionals, Inc., and taught Jack Welch and his entire staff their Six Sigma Green Belt training. Also, look for Dave’s free live webcast on August 19th, Assessing your New Product, Process or Service Introduction Methodology: Is yours premier? Does it enable Six Sigma performance?
Oops! Didn’t see that coming! Part 4
As a continuation from the July blog, we are now concluding with the “Optimize” and “Validate” phases of the ICOV (Identify-Conceptualize-Optimize-Validate) framework of a rigorous new design process as explained in “Services Design for Six Sigma – A Roadmap for Excellence”.
These phases are important because it allows time and methodology to optimize the design, develop all of the detailed documentation, verify performance and capability under operating conditions and manage an orderly transition to the new state.
The Optimize phase consists of a single stage (Design Optimization) and associated Tollgate 5 to validate successful completion of the requirements.
The Design Optimization stage involves completing all of the detailed design documentation, building Prototypes of the design, simulating/analyzing Process Capability, preparing all Control Plans and updating the Design and Process Scorecards.
Tollgate 5 Exit Criteria:
o Agreement that functionality and performance meet the customers’ and business requirements under the intended operating conditions.
o Approval to proceed with the Validate stage.
Formal tools which can be used in this phase are Design Scorecard, Process Management, Mistake Proofing, Simulation, Change Management, Control Plans, Reliability and Robustness.
The Validate phase consists of two stages (Verification and Launch Readiness) and associated Tollgates (6 and 7) to validate successful completion of the requirements.
The Verification stage involves developing Pilot plans, Piloting the new design and process and analyzing and making adjustments to achieve the desired functionality and performance under operating conditions.
Tollgate 6 Exit Criteria:
o Agreement that functionality and performance from the pilot meet the customers’ and business requirements under the intended operating conditions.
o Approval to proceed with the Launch Readiness stage.
Formal tools which can be used in this phase are Design Scorecard, Process Management, Mistake Proofing, Change Management, Control Plans, Statistical Process Control (SPC), and Confidence Analysis.
The Launch Readiness stage involves developing Pilot plans, Piloting the new design and process and analyzing and making adjustments to achieve the desired functionality and performance under operating conditions.
Tollgate 7 Exit Criteria:
o Agreement that transition plans and training plans have been developed and are executable.
o Approval to proceed with the Production stage.
Formal tools which can be used in this phase are Transition Plans, Training Plans, Process management, Change Management and Control Plans.
Following the ICOV model we have now used a formal methodology that allows us to validate performance at progressive economical stages and have improved the ability to detect unknown risks thus avoiding the Oops! Didn’t see that coming!. It should be mentioned that the methodology should be flexible and scalable to adjust for level of invention and risk. A brand new invention (Research & Development) that has never been deployed in similar conditions is much different than implementing a known solution (Application Engineering) under new conditions.
» Part 1
» Part 2
» Part 3
BIO:
David Roy is an integral part of the Six Sigma community. He taught GE’s Jack Welch and entire staff Six Sigma, as well as served as Senior Vice President of Textron Six Sigma. He is a Certified GE Master Black Belt, was instrumental in developing GE’s DMADV (DFSS) methodology, and has taught 3 waves of DFSS Black Belts. David holds an BS in Mechanical Engineering from The University of New Hampshire. He is also the co-author “Services Design for Six Sigma – A Roadmap for Excellence”
Palisade’s Six Sigma Calculator allows you to create a function that models the performance of a process with uncertain elements. It allows you to include uncertainty around design factors through the use of probability distributions. It was built by Palisade Custom Development using the @RISK Developer’s Kit (RDK) to perform a Monte Carlo simulation so the following process capability metrics can be calculated: Cpk, Cpk Upper, Cpk Lower, Sigma Level, DPM, Cp, Ppk, Pp.
At the 2010 Palisade Risk Conference in London, David Inbar of Minet Technologies presented a talk on supply chain risk management.
In the example he presents, a company is trying to decide how best to balance the sales of certain families of products to maximize revenue, maintain a diverse product line, and properly price each individual product based on the impact to the manufacturing schedule and fixed cost allocation.
The 
Having talked in 
It’s clear that the financial crisis has exposed a number of failings in the practice of risk management. In my last post I talked about the relevance risk analysis and the disciplines of ‘quantitative risk management’ (QRM) and ‘decision making under uncertainty’ (DMU) are to all sizes of organisations, be it large or small. 
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