Lean Six Sigma is becoming a concept well known that is becoming more and more widely

known and usedto many as a merger between Six Sigma and Lean Production that aimsing to
make process improvements. The Bbenefits of combining Lean and Six Sigma, compared to
implementing either one in isolationisolated implementation of one of the concepts, are still
have not yet been fully explored., tThere is, however, a strong interest from practitioners in
Lean Six Sigma aand, thus therefore, a need for scholarly investigations.

Six Sigma, as well as and Lean Production, has its both have their origins in improvements
improving of production processes, but have since been developed and reshaped into
associated concepts suited for product development, i.e.specifically Design for Six Sigma
(DFSS) and Lean Product Development (LPD), respectively. In light of the interest created
around surrounding Lean Six Sigma, one might it is worth pondering the future connections,
or a possible merger, between DFSS and LPD. A merger between DFSS and LPD has been
proposed in, for example, e.g. [7] and [8],. with LPD The latter has applied suggesting that the
result of the merger be named Design for Lean Six Sigma (DFLSS) to the merger. However,
the Such a merger of the two concepts still deserves more elaboration and critical evaluation.

One main commonality of Six Sigma and Lean is quality management [6]. Quality
Management has been described as a concept with related principles, practices and
techniques/tools., the The main principles are related to customer focus, continuous
improvement and teamwork [9], while. Tthe practices are activities done conducted to
implement the principles, and can thus be seen as the observable facet of Quality Management
[10]. Thus tThe level of practices is therefore suitable for empirical studies performed to
explore the practical meaning of a certain concept.

The purpose of this paper is to explore certain industrial practices of DFSS and LPD. This
entails identifying the differences and similarities between of the two concepts, which will be;
useful as a basis for future efforts to strengthen these concepts and contributing will
contribute to a discussion on their possible merger. As a background to the data presented,
tThe following paragraphs will introduce central thoughts in on DFSS and LPD, which will
serve as a background to the data that is presented later.

The outline of the paper is as followedfollows.; the following contains It begins with a
theoretical background, followed by a method chapter and description analysis of the results
from the empirical study. In the following, DFSS and LPD are then compared on the basis of
the practical experiences of the studied companies studied. In tThe final section of the paper,
the discusses the implications of this the study are discussed and draws conclusions drawn.