Discovery Assessments

Discovery Assessments provide a focused, on-site, working review of product designs and/or process performance. For processes, a team completes a process map and metric review to identify performance gaps, projects, and benefits. In the case of design, a team does an assessment of product performance, warranty items, reliability performance, any available marketing projections or competitive data, and the design process itself to identify strategic improvement opportunities.

Deployment Assessments

How does a company determine Six Sigma or DFSS success? Are there missed improvement opportunities? Where are the opportunities? Deployment assessments evaluate the Six Sigma progress with respect to leadership, management, training, roadmap application and results. Feedback includes strengths and weaknesses of the deployment and results, specific improvement suggestions, and objective benchmark data against other Six Sigma firms based on Uniworld’s experience across many industries and international firms. Against a structured framework of proven measures, the assessment provides the management team with objective data on its current status, strengths, and weaknesses compared to other firms.

Design Assessments

How efficient and effective are your technology and product development processes? Do you have a documented development process? Is this process utilized as intended? Do you have effective methods in place to assess and minimize development risks such as cost overruns, schedule slippage, design rework loops, poor product capability, poor reliability, products that don’t make it to market after large resource investments?

Design & Development assessments evaluate your company’s product and process development methods to identify risk minimization opportunities. Specific items reviewed include:

• the defined design process including design, peer, and formal gate reviews
• the defined design deliverables
• integration of DFSS tools, outcomes, deliverables with the gate reviews
• execution of the defined design process exhibited by documented records

Is the approach defined, rigorous, and executed as documented? Is management involved and asking the right questions? Are projects allowed to progress without the right data and information?

The product development process is a critical element to the sustainability and growth of any company. Having a defined development process to design products and processes is key to minimizing risks and assuring that you are using resources wisely – on the “right” product(s) with the right characteristics and specifications.