Six Sigma and the New Product Life Cycle

The revolution in the high-technology industries has shrunk design and use product life cycles to a period of weeks and months through concurrent engineering. At the same time, traditional design and manufacturing cycles m electronics circuits, tooling, and packaging have had to be modified or outsourced to keep up with the pace of new and lower-cost product introductions. The design team has been extended through the ubiquitous Internet to include collaborative activities within the company, its customers, and suppliers. This chapter will investigate current trends in design, manufacturing acceleration, and achieving world class quality in order to establish best practices for the high-technology industries and to avoid the pitfalls of early adopters of these methodologies.

The major premises of concurrent engineering have mostly been achieved, in terms of faster time to market, colocation of the various product creation team members to increase communications and feedback, and the use of design and quality metrics to monitor and improve the design process. The challenge is how to maintain and improve these gains by leveraging the trends in the globalization of design and manufacturing resources, and the wide use of the Internet as a communication tool.     .

This chapter is divided into three sections:

1. Background: concurrent engineering successes and new trends. Section 9.1 is a review of the recent trends m new product creation, including the impact of using the Internet for communication | among global resources in design and manufacturing.     

2. Supply chain development. The advent of the supply chain provides for new emphasis on the need to make sure that six goals are achieved in a decentralized environment. The supply chain development，communications, qualifications, and management are discussed in Section 9.2 relative to achieving the overall quality goals of new products and potential problems of using the supply chain, including the issues of trading competency versus dependency.

3. Product life cycle and six sigma design quality issues. The total product life cycle stages are discussed in Section 9.3 in terms of six sigma and communications within the enterprise and expectations and goals for each stage.