The crux of the learning is to understand that a corporation manages and abates variation in three key ways throughout all its business units, facilities, departments, teams and processes. The first is through its capability for creating high-quality designs with a high potential for avoiding or tolerating potential variation. (While the general idea of variation is well understood, there is a wide range of variation categories that can be used to pragmatically focus a Dr Deming initiative. Each individual company must consider the nature of its business, customers, systems, processes, technology and other factors as it recognizes and defines pertinent categories of variation.) We call this capability DFDD. The second way a corporation manages and abates variation is through its capability for creating high-quality processes that have a high potential for avoiding kinetic variation and, thereby, for realizing value. We call this capability PFDD. The third way a corporation manages and abates variation is through its capability for deploying and implementing the ideas, knowledge, practices and methods required to unify the aims of DFDD and PFDD in an integrated and synergistic manner. We call this capability MFDD.
3 MODES
All three modes of DFDD are supported by the Breakthrough Strategy, which is ultimately personified by Plan, Do,
Study, Act (PDSA) - the four stages of improvement. In turn, the Breakthrough Strategy is supported by a host of enabling
technologies, embedded within which are the Dr Deming application tools, methods, techniques and procedures. Let's peel
another layer back to reveal the essence and underlying principles.
DFDD is focused on abating the various forms of variation attributable to the design of a product, service, system, process, transaction, activity or event, regardless of its nature (industrial or commercial). Looking deeper into DFDD, we discover that it is concerned with two equally important and often interrelated aims. First, it is concerned with reducing the relative number of variation opportunities and consequential exposures inherent to the functional performance and physical attributes of a design (customer satisfaction issues). The variation consequence of a design that is subjected to marginal overstress, or the variation of a design feature not having been assigned an adequate performance specification, are examples of such variation. Second, DFDD is concerned with reducing the relative number of variation opportunities and consequential exposures associated with the "processing viability" of a design (provider satisfaction issues). The variation of assigning overly conservative tolerances that ultimately result in the need for expensive, higher-grade production processes is an example of such variation.
THINK
Utter drivel? YES. Yet thousands of companies swallowed this alphabet goulash, vomited by the self-confessed con man who created Six Sigma. Harry of course substituted his "Six Sigma" trash for "Dr Deming" and "DfSS" for "DfDD".
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)