Abstract: Six Sigma is a method that provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation helps lead to defect reduction and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services. In the era of cut-throat competition, especially in automobile sector, success of an organization resides in its ability to respond quickly to the needs of its customers. These customer needs must be attended with minimum manufacturing costs, minimum lead time to launch the product in market, and delivering better performance than the existing competitors in the market. Six Sigma is a powerful methodology which ultimately helps in cost reduction. Because of defect prevention and improved product and processes, it leads to increase in profitability and market share. This is accomplished through the use of two Six Sigma sub-methodologies. By adopting Design For Six Sigma methodology in the design stage itself leads to launch of a product with maximum quality performance, with tighter tolerances, and with reduced or no defects. This paper considers cost of poor quality as the loss imparted to society from the time the product is shipped, and deals with the applications and benefits of Six Sigma methodology and its positive impact on cost of poor quality. A case study is presented, which enabled application of six sigma methodology in wider range of manufacturing activities. This paper is of value to the researcher in the field of quality management, as well as professionals in the manufacturing industry, wherever the quality improvement is an issue. Quality costs or Cost of Quality is a means to quantify the total cost of quality related efforts and deficiencies. Six Sigma is a strategic initiative to boost profitability, increase market share and improve customer satisfaction through statistical tools that can lead to breakthrough quantum gains in quality. A case study is carried out in automobile casting industry, where Six Sigma tools i.e. Taguchi approach for the defect reduction is applied, which analyses various significant process parameters of the casting process at a foundry, based at north India. This study aims to develop a novel approach to create Six Sigma projects and identify the critical parameters of these projects. The optimized parameters obtained using Taguchi method will then be tested in an industrial case study and a trade-off will be made to finalize the recommended process parameters used in manufacture automobile parts.
Keywords: Define Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC), Quality costs or Cost of Quality, Taguchi approach, Six Sigma, automobile parts, minimum manufacturing costs, minimum lead time and increased market share.
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DOI:
10.17148/IJARCCE.2020.9905
