Analysis of scheduled Engineering Design

This paper concerns the analysis of Engineering Planning times for a Direct Fired Heater using a Six Sigma approach. The purpose is the validation of congruency between scheduled engineering design activities and the performed ones. The analysis aims to discover the relationship between scheduled times and performed ones, trying to discern the causes that may create any delay/advance in delivery dates. This because any delay may create a “reactive” Over-Run (where Over-Run means every extraordinary time spent by a resource over his established labour time), or that may cause the delivery to be early, thus creating a “forecast” Over-Run. Since the Six Sigma methodology is strongly focused on an analytical approach in order to resolve any kind of problem attacking the route-causes, this paper shows the flexibility and the power of the methodology, even though this is a study (not a complete project), to achieve a better knowledge of the process (planning times activities), by means of numerical and statistical tools. In particular to improve the design of scheduling activities, the paper describes an application of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Axiomatic Design (AD)