Six Theta® is the point at which quality going in is identical to the quality coming out, resulting in predictability and consistency in both design and production. With Six Theta®, quality can be quantified, and waste in design can be eliminated. Six Theta® is a registered trademark.

Six Theta® vs. Six Sigma

In the same way that Six Sigma is an objective measure of production capability, Six Theta® is an objective measure of design capability.

While the Six Sigma methodology strives to reduce variance by optimising production technologies and processes, Six Theta® reduces the sensitivity to variance of a given engineering design, thus easing production demands.

The two methods are as such supplementary. With Six Theta®, we measure your level of compliance in design on the basis of objective criteria just as Six Sigma measures your level of compliance in production.

What we often find is that companies are at a lower level of compliance than they assumed and that they will benefit from identifying their own design weaknesses. This will enable them to optimise their designs.

Robust design

Robust Design is about creating products with predictable performance in streamlined product development processes.

Robust Design presents a strategic opportunity to ensure a high level of controllability in product development, raising quality levels and optimising in regards to material usage and production costs.

Robust Design is based on fully objective and quantifiable criteria. It was originally developed by Dr. Genichi Taguchi, a Japanese quality guru, who defined Robust Design as “reducing variation in a product without eliminating the causes of the variation”. In other words, making the product insensitive to variation.

Six Theta® design

Predictable performance of products has significant benefits, both when it comes to customer satisfaction and to production and assembly costs.

Based on the discipline Robust Design, Valcon has developed a new product development framework, Six Theta® design, which provides a supplementary way of achieving predictability.

Six Theta® comprises concrete construction tools and techniques, calculation methods and management tools that help improve mechanical design with focus on both the overall conceptual design architecture and the smallest component details. It enables the engineer, project manager and top manager to achieve maximum predictability in the design from development to production.

Focus is in particular on the early-stage design. Before going into detailed design, Six Theta® ensures that whichever solution concept is generated is predictable in performance in tests and when on market, thus minimising costly iterations. The objective is to design products and components that perform inherently predictably with significant advantages when it comes to tolerance requirements and material utilisation.