Leveraging Six Sigma disciplines to drive improvement

Six Sigma provides the opportunity and discipline to eliminate mistakes, improve morale, and save money. Doing things right and keeping them consistent are the ideas behind Six-Sigma. A fundamental objective of Six Sigma is to achieve customer satisfaction with continuous improvement in quality. Process control and manufacturing variation reduction are important but companies often discover that the majority of their quality problems were actually created during the design process. An example of improving manufacturing process capability to give bottom line cost savings and customer satisfaction is presented in this paper. The methodology to increase system robustness through Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is presented and demonstrated through the extension of the case study of crankshaft journal lobing design robustness improvements.