The design discipline of Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) has been applied to many areas of product development and manufacturing. As DFSS application has recently been extended to upfront automotive engineering areas such as research and advanced development, more robust and optimized technologies can be achieved in the pre-production stage, reducing cost, exhibiting superior quality and performance, and shortened development cycle. This paper describes the application of the DFSS process, Define, Characterize, Optimize, and Verify (DCOV) to develop an automotive technology that begins from the conceptual phase and continues up through the implementation phase.
The role of DFSS in the automotive industry is to provide a framework for more rigorous upfront engineering. It provides guidelines to a more effective and efficient development of new technologies. The primary purpose of the DCOV process is to reduce or eliminate failures throughout the life of product development and identify counter-measures before the product is released into the hands of the customers.
The process began when the DFSS Blackbelt and sub-team defined the technology scope and objectives, identified the team, and analyzed customer requirements that were then translated into engineering characteristics or product target specifications. Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) was an enabler to effectively characterize and optimize the system design. The implementation of a DCOV discipline allowed the team to achieve a robust and reliable design that ultimately could lead to a shortened time to market, with higher quality, and reduced product cost. The DCOV methodologies utilized on this technology can be equally applied to any automotive engineering technologies that are either in a conceptual design phase or are in the design enhancements phase.