Suppose you are a pump manufacturer. You want to design a pump for a liquid packaging system that draws processed fluids from a vat into jars at a consistent rate. You want to meet the specified flow rate target and limits while maximizing performance and minimizing costs.
Using the phases of DFSS, you follow this overall design approach:
Define — Obtain an appropriate flow rate target and limits from the customer and recommend a type of pump based on customer considerations
Measure — Consider the elements of the Known Flow Rate equation to determine the pump design features that affect flow rate and obtain information about tolerances, costs, and so on
Analyze — Use Monte Carlo analysis and sensitivity analysis to study how different design elements affect pump performance and affect production quality
Design — Use optimization techniques with defined tradeoffs between flow rate performance and total cost to determine the design parameters that best meet a defined quality level while reducing cost
Validate — Based on the optimized design parameters, create physical prototypes and test to confirm that this design configuration yields the best-performing, most cost-effective pump
In the Define and Measure phases, you obtain and use information to build a Crystal Ball model. Then, you use Crystal Ball to simulate real-world variations that occur in the actual manufacturing of the product. Finally, if you have Crystal Ball Decision Optimizer, you can use sensitivity analysis and further optimization to arrive at the best balance between quality and cost.
The following sections give details of each phase:
The next main section, Using the DFSS Liquid Pump model, works through these phases using a Crystal Ball example model.