Up to now Six Sigma has mainly been used for manufacturing. A Six Sigma approach was introduced in 2004 at Tenneco for transactional business
This paper illustrates 2 examples where Six Sigma was successfully applied to improve the service quality.
One first case is the improvement of a measurement system analysis [1]. In the exhaust system domain the acoustic performance of an exhaust system must meet the requirements in terms of drive-by noise of a vehicle and in terms of subjective sound. Therefore it is vital to measure the so-called “tailpipe noise” of an exhaust system with precision and reliability. Otherwise some iterations take place to confirm the data, or - more critical - an exhaust system design can be rejected when in reality it is just meeting the target curves and inversely, this could be accepted when the targets are not met.
A so-called “measurement system analysis” firstly allows us to describe the current status (gage R + R), and then with the help of
an xy diagram
a fishbone diagram
a process map
a process FMEA
analysis tools
we try to understand the causes of the measurement problems and to improve the repeatability and reproducibility of the measurement system
A similar approach was used for a second case [2], the “Design Release Process”. The SAP data consists of
basic data
classification
engineering BOM
With the help of Six Sigma it was established that the current quality of this data was not acceptable. In a similar way the causes were analysed, the gage repeatability and reproducibility was performed before and after improvement.
The design release process was drastically optimised and consequently the variation was minimised by eliminating the waste.