By Sue Reynard
When innovation is the lifeblood of a company, it cannot rely solely on the fickleness of inspiration. This basic premise underlies research and development at The Dow Chemical Co. "Innovation is extremely critical to Dow’s strategy to be the premier chemical company in the world," said Mike Costa, who recently retired as corporate director for Quality, Process and Architecture after 27 years with the company. "That means Dow not only has to run better than competitors, but also has to respond to changes in the marketplace by having new products to fill the demand space."
Dow answers these dictates with a systematic blend of Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), which supplants inspiration with investigation. It has proven to be a powerful combination. "Six Sigma and DFSS bring the kind of up-front decision making that makes sure the problems you’re working on are important to the business," said Tom Kling, a longtime Dow employee who served as Master Black Belt for the installation and start-up of Six Sigma and DFSS in the company’s 1,700-person corporate R&D department. TRIZ, on the other hand, "helps you arrive at new solutions by importing technical solutions or scientific principles from other disciplines," he said. "So you solve design problems much more quickly."
The Six Sigma Umbrella
To encourage improvements and innovations throughout the company, Dow deliberately integrated the training and application of all its improvement and innovation tools within the structure of Six Sigma. "Promotion relies in part upon having a minimum level of Six Sigma certification," Costa said. "The CEO has made it quite clear that the quality skill set is critical for every employee in the company and that Six Sigma will be used to drive performance across the portfolio of businesses." Karen Trzcinski, who was tapped to succeed Costa as the corporate director of Six Sigma, said the company is keeping everything under the Six Sigma umbrella to minimize confusion and prevent wasted effort changing the label every few years. "Now any new addition is just another tool to put in Dow’s toolbox," she said. "We’ve been able to integrate DFSS tools, TRIZ and Lean concepts like value stream mapping into the overall training."
Trzcinski’s prior role was manager of the Work Process Methodology Expertise Center, which coordinates the training. Trzcinski likes having the creativity tools blended in throughout the curriculum. "Innovation doesn’t have to be a single humongous breakthrough," she said. "Innovation and creativity can enter into all projects. Any team can come up with great ideas and reduce them to practice. That’s innovation, too. It doesn’t only have to mean you’re developing a brand new product."
Faster to Market
TRIZ includes creativity tools that help teams understand functional needs and satisfy them in a more rapid time frame. For example, Dow wanted to convert a manufacturing plant that made polyethylene products to one that could also produce polypropylene products. Kling explained that developing the new design would normally take about a year, and conventional creativity methods would shorten the time to nine months. But the business need was to complete the conversion in six months. The TRIZ tool the ideal final result enabled the project team to identify ways to accelerate approvals and areas where they could process key activities in parallel in order to meet the six-month timetable, he said. Kling also offered empirical proof of TRIZ’s effectiveness as a creativity method. "With a group of 10 people in a brainstorming session, we’d often end up with anywhere from 200 to 500 solutions, but perhaps only 3 to 5 percent of those ideas would be useful. The rest would be dismissed quickly during evaluation," he said. "With the structured thinking and analysis that occurs with TRIZ methods, we’ve found that a similar group of people would get about 75 to 100 ideas, but at least half to two-thirds were viable. So there is a higher yield of useful solution ideas with TRIZ techniques."
Another measure of TRIZ’s value to Dow is the number of patents generated in design projects, Kling continued. "Typically, we’d generate one or two patentable ideas in a project. Using more advanced tools in TRIZ, we’re able to define a whole range of alternatives and get six to eight patents in such a project." Some of those patents are put into practice immediately, and others can act as a competitive blocking mechanism – the company can describe the full range of inventions possible around a technology and get those patents before others even think of entering the space.
More Choices, Better Results
With Dow’s combination of tools and methods, teams have a high success rate delivering the intended improvement, be it a step change or a breakthrough. The company has run more than 11,000 projects over the past eight years. According to Kevin McCarron, Master Black Belt and DFSS technology expert, "Only about 5 percent to 10 percent of those are what we’d call innovation projects – breakthrough projects that pull out the stops to achieve a new level of performance." The majority, he said, fall into what Dow terms either implement or improvement projects (the former akin to "just do it" projects where you implement already proven technology and the latter, basic DMAIC projects). From a business standpoint, the integrated approach Dow uses also adds a needed flexibility. Innovation projects typically run eight to nine months, Costa said, while improvement projects run four to five months. DMAIC delivers an earlier return, he said, but when revolutionary change is needed, teams are able to tackle harder problems with advanced toolsets like DFSS and TRIZ.
Conclusion
Deciding to integrate toolsets like DFSS and TRIZ into a Six Sigma deployment requires a leap of faith because the gains are often quantifiable only in hindsight. But Costa thinks Dow’s experience can serve as a benchmark for others. "Most corporate initiatives burn brightly for 18 months or two years, then die out," he said. Dow has been at this for nine years and has seen a return of "thousands of percent over investment."
About the Author:
Sue Reynard is a freelance writer and a frequent contributor to iSixSigma Magazine.
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