Design for Six Sigma is an application of Six Sigma principles to the design of products and their manufacturing and support processes. Design for Six Sigma is a systematic methodology using tools, training, and measurements to enable one to design products and processes that meet customer expectations that can be produced at Six Sigma quality levels. Design for Six Sigma is customer driven. To deliver faster to market, higher quality, and less costly new products and services. Only about 60% of new products launched in all industries are successful. It minimizes the waste of resources. Did you know that about 45% of resources allocated to developing new products is expended on products that fail to provide adequate financial return? Introduction to Six Sigma principles early just makes good financial sense, especially when you consider 75 to 80% of the product's cost is established in the design phase. Some of the most common reasons for failure of new products include an adequate market analysis, product problems or defects, lack of effective marketing effort, higher cost than anticipated, competitive strength or reaction, poor timing of introduction, and technical or production problems. Design for Six Sigma differs from Six Sigma because it is more proactive, meant for new products, services, and processes, and focuses on marketing, research and development, and design rather than manufacturing or transactional processes. Where Six Sigma focuses on streamlining the production and business process to reduce or eliminate mistakes and save money, Design for Six Sigma starts earlier to develop the process itself, so fewer wrinkles appear in the first place. Thus, systematically preventing downstream errors. The essence of Design for Six Sigma is predicting design quality upfront and driving quality measurement and predictability improvement during the early design phases. It is a much more effective and less expensive way to get Six Sigma quality than trying to fix problems later. The benefits of Design for Six Sigma include reduced time to market products, shorter development cycle time, reduced life cycle costs associated with products, reduced number of changes and iterations. Therefore, reduced number of prototypes during the design stage, organization's ability to manage risk in design processes of products and services, increased understanding of customer expectations and their priorities related to product service attributes, data driven decisions, reduced warranty costs, and improved market share as well as business profitability. Other benefits include an enhanced quality and reliability of products and services that can be experienced, increased robustness or product performance in the consumer's hand, and improved product fit. Of course, no process is without its share of challenges. For Design for Six Sigma, we must determine which metrics to evaluate the deployment against. Since the products in the case company will not be in production for several months. Also recognize that Design for Six Sigma is nothing new and does not add anything to the current body of knowledge. There are many design for Six Sigma methodologies in use today. One of the more common approaches is IDOV. IDOV stands for Identify, Design, Optimize, and Validate. We can identify through a team charter, voice of the customer, quality function deployment, failure mode and effects analysis, and benchmarking. In the design phase, we emphasize critical to quality characteristics, identify functional requirements, develop alternatives, evaluate, and select. In optimize, we use process capability information, statistical tolerancing, robust design, and various Six Sigma tools. Validate mandates us to test and validate the design.