1. Creating a Customer Focus
Chapter 4

2. Creating a Customer Focus
From a customer’s standpoint, neither quality, cost nor schedule always comes first. When customers evaluate the products and services they receive, they make trade-offs between all three key factors in order to maximize value. The challenge that suppliers face is to provide their customers with the maximum value, which often is a balancing act between quality, cost and schedule. 
Process Improvement Essentials
The First Among Equals, Quality Digest, June 1999

3. Creating a Customer Focus
Dr. Armand Feigenbaum ( )
Author of Total Quality Control, one of the first and most complete texts on quality assurance

4. Creating a Customer Focus
Feigenbaum’s definition of Quality:
Quality is a customer determination which is based on the customer’s actual experience with the product or service, measured against his or her requirements—stated or unstated, conscious or merely sensed, technically operational or entirely subjective—always representing a moving target in a competitive market.

5. Creating a Customer Focus
How do we create an unwavering focus on the customer?
How do we ensure that our strategic plans and our leadership focuses on what is important to the customer and the market?

6. Creating a Customer Focus
Effective organizations talk to customers, translate what their customers said into appropriate actions, and align their key business processes to support what their customers want.

7. Creating a Customer Focus
Why bother?
Business environment is extremely competitive
Today’s consumers demand quality more than ever before
Consumers are more willing to switch from company to company and not just to get a better price. They will switch for better service: reliability, accessibility, courtesy, and so on.

8. Creating a Customer Focus
Why bother?
It is significantly cheaper to retain existing customers than to attract new ones.
Our competitors are gaining and it’s not getting any easier.

9. Creating a Customer Focus
Creating an organization that has at its core the ability to sustain an unwavering focus on the customer is not a task for a single department within the organization.
Involve everyone!

10. Creating a Customer Focus
Lean Six Sigma organizations achieve a competitive advantage by carefully and constantly analyzing customers’ needs and by organizing and operating to meet these needs the first time and every time.

11. Creating a Customer Focus
How will we know what the customer wants?
Ask them.

12. Creating a Customer Focus
Capture the voice of the customer
Use the voice of the customer to drive changes in the way you do business.
Quality Function Deployment

13. Creating a Customer Focus
Steps to perform a QFD
Determine the voice of the customer
What does the customer want
Have the customer rank the relative importance of his or her wants
Have the customer evaluate your company against competitors
Determine hoe the wants will be met
How does the company provide the wants

14. Creating a Customer Focus
5. Determine the direction of improvement for the technical requirements
6. Determine the operational goals for the technical requirements
7. Determine the relationship between each of the customer wants and the technical requirements
8. Determine the correlation between the technical requirements

15. Creating a Customer Focus
9. Compare the technical performance with that of competitors
10. Determine the column weights
11. Add regulatory and/or internal requirements
12. Analyze the QFD matrix.