A joint application of design for six sigma and taguchi-response surface method in supply chain process design

In the current competitive context, the effective design of the supply chain process is even more important for businesses. Practitioners need to design robust and efficient processes that are at the same time focalized on business needs. In the present work we propose to combine two different methods: metamodel based design optimization (MBDO) and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS). The approach proposed, take advantage from DFSS structure to reduce the metamodel input variables. Most of MBDO techniques are complex and requires huge quantity of simulation. Therefore among the MBDO techniques, we have chosen to implement Taguchi and Response surface method (T-RSM). DFSS is a structured method, therefore easy to merge with other techniques and easily integrable with MBDO. In this paper we use T-RSM to obtain a robust metamodel performing a small number of simulations, therefore resulted less complex to apply than other MBDO techniques. The DFSS’s Method used in this paper was: DIDOV. The first two phases of DIDOV have been focalized on business goal and needs. In those phases degrees of freedom of the metamodel input variables were reduced. Merging DIDOV and T-RSM we got a reduced and focalized on business experiment plan. In this paper we show that the joint implementation of DFSS and T-RSM allows to obtain a design process focalized on business goal and leaner than other application of MBDO techniques in process design. A Case study of applying DFSS and MBDO is provided to show the implementation of this approach in a Supply chain process design. The presented approach results implementable in various context like product development and service process design.