DFSS Approach for The long-term economic success of an organization

depends on its ability to devise strategies and processes that

Economic Success of are based on its products. Some of the key business drivers
PDM Implementation that influence these strategies and processes are time-to-
market, manufacturing costs, and product configurability.
Availability of accurate, timely, and sharable product
information across the product’s lifecycle is imperative for a
product-centric organization.

Digitizing product data by deploying a PDM system may

prove to be insufficient in addressing the business problem
in its entirety. Existing business processes have to be
analyzed to determine whether they are adequate and the
necessary changes should be incorporated before
embarking on digitization. The economic success of a PDM
implementation depends on identifying key business
drivers, designing and IT-enabling capable processes, and
continuously monitoring the digitized processes as well as
the PDM system.

This paper explores Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) approach for
economic success.
 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

About the Authors

Pitchiah Ramaswamy
Pitchiah Ramaswamy works with the Engineering and
Industrial Services (EIS) unit of TCS. He is currently associated
with the Energy, Resources, and Utilities (ERUG) vertical and is
responsible for business development. He has previously
managed various key TCS business relationships in USA and
Europe and has helped achieved business growth in several
engineering services areas. He holds a Six Sigma Black Belt
certification and specializes in carrying out consulting
assignments for the reduction of the cost of operations in the
financial sector. An MBA graduate from the Universite De
Montreal, Montreal, Canada, Pitchiah Ramaswamy also holds
a master’s degree in engineering from the College of
Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, India.

Ganeshraj Machandran
Ganeshraj Machandran has over 12 years of experience in PLM
and PLM-related technologies. He is currently working in the
capacity of a PLM Project manager for a European customer.
Prior to this, he has managed key roles in the PLM functional
group as the Lead, Center of Excellence, Teamcenter
Engineering and is vastly experienced in consulting as well as
implementation functions.

Subbanarasaiah K.V. Akshintala

Subbanarasaiah K.V. Akshintala was a senior consultant at TCS.
Vastly experienced in consulting and implementation ,he had
been associated with PLM for over 10 years. Over the years he
had held many positions like Project Manager and COE
Leader. He had also been involved in engineering design and
automation services.

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3
2. Need for Measurement 3
3. Objective Measurement of Success 4
4. DFSS Approach for Measurement 4
5. Measurement Framework – High level 5

6. Representative Implementation Scenario 6

7. Conclusion 8

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Introduction
The long-term economic success of an organization depends on its ability to devise strategies and processes that are
based on its products. Some of the key business drivers that influence these strategies and processes are time-to-
market, manufacturing costs, and product configurability. Availability of accurate, timely, and sharable product
information across the product’s lifecycle is imperative for a product-centric organization.

Digitizing product data by deploying a PDM system may prove to be insufficient in addressing the business problem
in its entirety. Existing business processes have to be analyzed to determine whether they are adequate and the
necessary changes should be incorporated before embarking on digitization. The economic success of a PDM
implementation depends on identifying key business drivers, designing and IT-enabling capable processes, and
continuously monitoring the digitized processes as well as the PDM system.

Need for Measurement

The definition of the success of a PDM implementation is different for different roles in an organization. This lack of a
common scale of measurement further complicates the issue of measuring the success. Success, from the point of
view of the CEO is measured in terms of the resultant organizational benefits, whereas for the CFO, success is
measured in terms of the financial benefits accrued. The CIO, on the other hand, will measure success in terms of the
benefits afforded by the implementation of information technology. Similarly, end users and stakeholders will have
their own set of criteria against which they measure the success of the implementation.

Different Perspectives of Economic Success

CEO -> Organizational Success CFO -> Financial Success

Helps realize company vision and mission

l Creates additional revenue streams
l

Creates new market and customer

l Enables cost savings through best utilization
l

opportunities of technology
Improves market position
l Accelerated ROI
l

Improves the capability to serve customers

l Lowers cost of production and servicing
l

Increases competitiveness and ability to

l Increases cash flow
l

charge a premium

VP–Engineering -> Operational Success CIO -> Technological Success

Improves internal communication between

l Maintains intellectual property investment
l

departments and groups Strengthens application/system security

l

Increases employee and process

l Enables adherence to service level agreement
l

productivity (SLA) obligations

Reduces cycle time of product Introduction
l Decreases maintenance/support costs
l

Reduces process steps

l Improves application/system performance
l

Simplifies processes and workflow mechanisms

l and reliability
Improves application/system utilization rate
l

Increases efficiency of support activities

l

Increases productivity through automation

l

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Objective Measurement of Success

To arrive at the economics success, success criteria of all the stakeholders must be met. Business cases for PDM
implementation instances are approved by the management based on the ROI figures presented. The ROI is
calculated by consolidating all the tangible and intangible benefits expected from the implementation.
Consequently, tracking and measuring the same set of criteria used for calculating the ROI can realize an accurate
illustration of the implementation’s economic success.

However, in a typical PDM implementation, the ROI figures that are quoted during the business case presentation
are rarely followed up on during the implementation. The success or failure of the implementation is usually
decided on the basis of end-user feedback. Success, from the perspective of the end-user community, depends on
how user friendly the new system is when compared to the existing/previous system. Although user friendliness of
the new system is an important criterion against which the success of the implementation can be measured, it is
often wrongly considered to be the only criterion.

The best approach would be to identify all the criteria, including the potential business benefits included while
calculating the ROI, and measure and track them towards for an objective interpretation of success. As this
measurement spans the conceptual stage of the implementation lifecycle to the post-implementation support
stage, a structured approach is imperative.

DFSS Approach for Measurement

Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology that describes process capability and variation. The Six Sigma
philosophy advocates that product improvement can be successfully achieved only through process improvement.

“ This Six Sigma Journey will change the paradigm from fixing products so they are perfect
to fixing processes so that they produce nothing but perfection, or close to it. ”

-- Jack Welch, former CEO, GE

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a systematic methodology, which enables organizations to design products and
processes that meet customer expectations. The DFSS approach is customer-centric and process-focused.

The DFSS methodology could be used to collect and prioritize business requirements, design new processes that
meet business requirements, build and deploy the IT system to enable the process, and continuously monitor the
system post implementation. DFSS phases such as Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify (DMADV) could be
suitably tailored to achieve the same.

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Measurement Framework – High Level

Success criteria should be identified at the beginning of the implementation and continuously tracked through the
support phase. While building the required PDM capabilities, success criteria should be collected and prioritized in
the form of business requirements. These business requirements should then be transformed into functional
requirements and built into the new system using a suitable architecture. Metrics should be identified and built into
the system to represent and track system health. Described below are the various phases in the identification and
tracking of success criteria that govern the PDM implementation.

Define

In this phase, the PDM implementation team implementing the DFSS approach identifies business problems, the
case for action, the necessity/justification for a solution, a broad solution set, and the expected business benefits
from the implementation. This information forms the basis for calculating business benefits in terms of financial
return and preparing a business case.

Measure

During the Measure phase, PDM process consultants understand existing processes and systems and collect
feedback from stakeholders such as design engineering, manufacturing, QA, suppliers, and customers. They identify
and prioritize the requirements (CTQ) of all the relevant stakeholders and, using these inputs, establish the metrics
for measuring the success of the implementation.

Analyze

In this phase, the PDM implementation team will perform a functional analysis to develop high-level design
concepts that address metrics requirements. The best design among various design possibilities is then selected
using tools such as Pugh Matrix.

Design

During this phase, the project team will develop a detailed design based on the best fit, high-level design. The exact
data model, solution components, and user-interface requirements will be designed. The PDM technology solution
of choice will be configured and customized to conform to the best-fit design arrived at during the analyze phase.

Verify

During this phase, the metrics generated by the PDM system will be continuously monitored. Since these metrics
were designed to reflect the health of the PDM implementation, the reports generated using these metrics will
objectively represent the success or failure of the implementation.

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Representative Implementation Scenario

Consider a typical PDM system implementation scenario for a tier-1 automobile supplier organization. The
organization intends to use the vaulting and visualization capabilities of the PDM system to address the following
business problems.

lUncontrolled proprietary design information

lMultiple information sources with duplicate part information
lLong cycle time for locating design information
lNeed for a customer-driven digital design collaboration initiative

The engineering and IT groups of the organization defined the business benefits and calculated the ROI. Then,
success criteria were derived from the business benefits. A Six Sigma-based DFSS approach was used for seamlessly
incorporating the defined success criteria into the system architecture and design. The resulting system had a built-
in capability to collect metrics that represent the success criteria. The following phases clearly describe the
transformation of the success criteria into the system capability.

Define

lEase of data location and access

lReduction of redundant information/work
lReduction in design cycle time
lSecurity of intellectual data
lConfiguration of data
lCapability for light weight collaboration
lSystem response time

Measure

lPlan for information collection to measure success

lEvolve the following metrics for measuring success criteria

- Product data location time

- Number of duplicates
- Number of drawings released
- Time to release drawings
- Amount of proprietary information in public domain
- Number of drawings with version mismatch
- Search response time
- Utilization of collaboration tools by all target sites

lSet baseline metrics for the as-is system

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Analyze

lDefine product attributes to enable swift location of product information

lImplement the unique numbering concept
lDefine special identification for common and reusable part
lDefine digital product-definition workflow
lDevise role-based data access
lDefine digital workflow for configuration management
lImplement real-time drawing sharing
lDefine web-based part attribute search
lEvolve the expected values for identified metrics
lDefine the corrective action if the metrics fall out of control limits

Design

lDesign PDM schema

- Built-in capability to measure metrics

- Role-based access

lDevise drawing Number generator

lDefine processes and work-flow automation
lDesign the system architecture that satisfies performance criteria for search functions
lConfigure, customize, and integrate the chosen visualization with PDM system

Verify

lCollect the metrics

lAnalyze to check whether the values are in the control
lTake corrective action if the metrics are outside the control limits
lCalculate actual cumulative rate of return
lGenerate periodic reports on objective economic success

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 DFSS Approach for Economic Success of PDM Implementation

Conclusion
Selecting and rolling out a new PDM system does not always guarantee an economically successful implementation.
Satisfying all the stakeholders of the new PDM system requires an implementation that is based on a disciplined
approach. The approach should address various steps such as

lDefining the success criteria

lBuilding the system to meet the success parameters
lProviding built-in capability to measure success parameters
lMeasuring and tracking success parameters
lRepeating the above steps to enhance the system so as to meet new success criteria

Aligned to the above requirements, an implementation of the DFSS, which has already established itself as a well-
proven methodology, will ensure financial, organizational, operational and technological success.

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About TCS Engineering and Industrial About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
Services Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, business solutions and
Engineering and Industrial Services (EIS) is a strategic business unit of outsourcing organization that delivers real results to global
TCS that offers a wide spectrum of engineering services and businesses, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match.
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Utilities, Government, Industrial Machinery and Medical Devices.
A part of the Tata Group, India's largest industrial conglomerate,
TCS has over 143,000 of the world's best trained IT consultants in
42 countries. The company generated consolidated revenues of
US $6 billion for fiscal year ended 31 March 2009 and is listed on
the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India.

For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com

[email protected]
TCS Design Services M 0709

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