Practical Application of Six Sigma with a Focus on Transmitted Variation – A Door Check Arm Opening Effort Case Study

This paper presents an approach for Six Sigma strategies to reduce the occurrence of failure mechanisms. In general terms, there are two ways to reduce the failures: a) shifting or tuning - DMAIC approach or b) shrinking - DCOV approach. When shifting or tuning, we move the mean output away from the failure mode boundary and when shrinking, we reduce the variability of the output. Also, the paper illustrates with a case study - Cargo truck door opening effort check arm - where demand and capacity distributions had its distance to failure mode increased leading to high-quality low-cost alternative in vendor tooling.