Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1981. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-168). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

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Six Sigma, is a business strategy using quality improvement tool, began in the 1980s. An important problem in business has been how to implement Six Sigma at small sized companies. Many large companies are beginning to mandate Six Sigma to their supply base (smaller manufacturing companies) as a condition of future business. This is a problem because Six Sigma implementation can require millions of dollars in investment, dedication of the best resources and training of many employees in a business. Many small manufacturing companies do not have this time or the financial resources to invest in the long-term benefits of Six Sigma. Yet, there still exists a need to implement Six Sigma in these smaller companies This study will analyze the performance of large and small manufacturing companies deploying Six Sigma. The objective is to determine whether the long-term benefits of Six Sigma programs are really worth the cost investment for smaller manufacturing companies. Quantitative and qualitative measurements are used as variables for comparison. The reported revenue, costs and savings of five Fortune 500 companies who have implemented and managed successful Six Sigma programs are examined. A data collection instrument is developed to study the small manufacturing companies. Results show that there were apparent challenges in Six Sigma deployment regardless of company size. However, the benefits of Six Sigma deployment at small manufacturing companies were very apparent. Through the research it was found that small manufacturing companies have the capacity to implement successful Six Sigma programs. Recommendations for further study and an increased research population is also suggested for future research.

Todays fast-paced economy and complex global market has made it difficult for manufacturing companies to maintain their competitive edge. Products being developed today must stand apart from others, and lead the market in the way they meet customer needs. Tools to reduce product development time have been in use for decades, but recently new tools have become available to make significant reductions in the product development cycle. Specifically, simulation tools are becoming very useful for saving time in the design-build-test phase of product development. New simulation tools that compress the product development cycle change the way design errors are found and refined. Traditional product development would create a design, prototype that design, and test it for failures, then repeat the process until the performance was acceptable. A newly developed process combines CAD, CAE, and FEA simulation tools to create an interactive feedback loop in the front part of product development to significantly reduce development time. DesignXplorer VT (DX-VT) uses CAD, CAE, and FEA to form an easy to operate virtual simulation tool that can be used by engineers and designers in multiple stages of product development. From generating innovative designs, to shedding light on how designs can be optimized for peak performance, DX-VT has tools to make product development easier. Using DX-VT in the concept design stage and throughout the CAE analysis and testing stage will give designers and engineers a complete breakdown of what design parameters need changed. I have used DX-VT to create a benchmark test of how the software can be used for product development. I have used real world virtual prototypes from Technip Inc. to evaluate the realistic applications of this software. To capture this process a best practices guide was created to be a general guide on how to efficiently use Workbench Design Modeler, Simulation, and DesignXplorer for enhancing product development. This guide was tailored to Technip Inc. and their most recent project, the Red Hawk. The best practices guide demonstrates how to use the Ansys Workbench software to simulate actual components from the Red Hawk oil rig. The guide shows all the steps and features that were required to get this real life model to solve properly. The results of this product development process will cut development time at Technip by 1000s of man hours, and help in their goal to cut design costs by $2 million per project.

Reducing costs, increasing speed and leveraging the intelligence of partners involved during product design processes are important benefits of Internet-enabled collaborative product design and realization environments. The options for cost-effective product design, re-design or improvement are at their peak during the early stages of the design process and designers can collaborate with suppliers, manufacturers and other relevant contributors to acquire a better understanding of associated costs and product viability. Collaboration is by no means a new paradigm. However, companies have found distrust of collaborative partners to be the most intractable obstacle to collaborative commerce and Internet-enabled business especially in intellectual property environments, which handle propriety data on a constant basis. This problem is also reinforced in collaborative environments that are distributed in nature. Thus trust is the main driver or enabler of successful collaborative efforts or transactions in Internet-enabled product design environments. Focus is on analyzing the problem of ¡®trust for services¡¯ in distributed collaborative service provider assessment and selection, concentrating on characteristics specific to electronic product design (e-Design) environments. Current tools for such collaborative partner/provider assessment are inadequate or non-existent and researching network, user, communication and service trust problems, which hinder the growth and acceptance of true collaboration in product design, can foster new frontiers in manufacturing, business and technology. Trust and its associated issues within the context of a secure Internet-enabled product design & realization platform is a multifaceted and complex problem, which demands a strategic approach crossing disciplinary boundaries. A Design Environment Trust Service (DETS) framework is proposed to incorporate trust for services in product design environments based on client specified (or default) criteria. This involves the analysis of validated network (objective) data and non-network (subjective) data and the use of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodology for the selection of the most efficient service provision alternative through the minimization of distance from a specified ideal point and interpreted as a Dynamic (Design) Trust Index (DTI) or rank. Hence, the service requestor is provided with a quantifiable degree of belief to mitigate information asymmetry and enable knowledgeable decision-making regarding trustworthy service provision in a distributed environment.

Design is functionality driven. All products and parts have some intended reason behind their existence. Although computer aided systems have made considerable advances in capturing and representing geometrical shape, not much progress has been made in capturing and modeling product functionality and its physical realization. This research proposes a methodology to assist designers during the first stages of design. This methodology provides a framework to help the designer translate functional specifications into conceptual forms. This research develops a translation tool to model functionality and to carry out conceptual design with the aid of the computer. This tool serves as a bridge between the conceptual design phase and the detailed design phase of a product. The translation tool developed in this research supports the conceptual design phase by providing a functional data model, a function server model, and a conceptual product model. The functional model includes the use of operands and relations to define and capture product functionality. The function server model represents the physical realization of the specified functions. The conceptual product model organizes and documents the product information in both the functional and the physical domains. The knowledge base for the function servers is stored in a function driven database. This database allows the designer to view design possibilities that may never have occurred to them. Models provided in this work have been implemented as a relational database system by using MySQL. A web-based graphic user interface is developed with PHP to provide an interactive environment for modeling and for searching the function driven database. Propagation of functional and physical information to downstream design activities has been enabled by the use of the XML data format. The models and concepts developed in this research are validated through a case study of a realistic mechanical device.

There is a widespread, but not universal, belief in the software community that software organizations and projects can systematically improve their ability to meet commitments and build high-quality products using principles of software quality management. Quality affects cost and schedule, therefore the engineering practices that affect quality are also a management concern. Understanding the factors that influence software quality is crucial to the continuing maturation of the software industry; an improved understanding of software quality drivers will help software engineers and managers make more informed decisions in controlling and improving the software process. My research is motivated by a desire to understand the effect of disciplined processes and effective teams on improving performance and lessening variability with respect to software quality. Classroom data provides insight into interpersonal differences between competent professionals as increasingly disciplined processes are adopted. Project data using similar processes enables an exploration of the impact of effective teams on software quality. My results show that: * Program size, programmer ability, and disciplined processes significantly affect software quality. * Factors frequently used as surrogates for programmer ability, e.g., years of experience, and technology, e.g., programming language, do not significantly impact software quality. * Recommended practices are not necessarily followed even when processes are consistently performed, e.g., peer reviews may be consistently performed, but the review rates may exceed recommended practice for effective reviews. * When moving from ad hoc processes to disciplined processes, top-quartile performers improve more than 2X; bottom-quartile performers improve more than 4X. * Rigorous statistical techniques that allow for individual differences confirm the importance of process discipline and following recommended practice for improving software quality.

Despite great advances in the field of ergonomics, its integration into computer-aided product design remains a great need, especially during conceptual design. In order that a product be designed for safety and comfort, it is essential that pertinent ergonomic principles be imposed as design constraints during design conceptualization. Further, it is vital that these constraints be propagated to downstream design activities so that they can be considered along with other design constraints such as manufacturing and assembly, in deriving design alternatives and subsequently in determining the outcome of the final product. This should enable the design of safer and more comfortable products, minimize design iterations that often result from ergonomic violations, reduce design cycle time and hence minimize product lifecycle cost. The objective of this dissertation was to provide an efficient and effective method for integrating ergonomics into computer aided product design. To achieve this objective, first, the principles of ergonomics in relation to product design were stated and then represented algebraically so that these principles can easily be integrated into computer aided design. Next, discrete products were categorized into twelve classes on the basis of the function(s) users would perform on them. Ergonomic principles constraining each product class were then provided. As such, by means of this categorization a designer should easily acquire ergonomic rules that constrain a design within a product category. Thirdly, to make ergonomic constraints available to downstream design activities for the generation of design alternatives and subsequently, the derivation of the final product, a means, based on Extensible Markup Language technology, was provided for ergonomic constraints propagation. This work was implemented in a Java-based software application and demonstrated in the design of a wheelchair seat cushion. For validation, the results obtained were compared to those of an existing product.

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Using social media to increase employment chances among college students