1. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 11 Voice-Of-The-Customer Process Part 1 Using Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

2. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 12 Stage Gate Technology Development and Review Intellectual Property Generation Technology Roadmapping Voice of the Customer New Concept Ideation An Integrated Strategic Technology Planning and Development Environment

3. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 13 QFD Resources We will be using a QFD format based on QFD Designer, available from IDEACore (www.ideacore.com).www.ideacore.com You can download a free demo version of their product from their web site. The download contains a good users manual that provides detailed explanations on how to do a QFD. Another good reference is: Quality Function Deployment, by Lou Cohen.

4. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 14 Quality Function Deployment Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a common general method invented in Japan in the late sixties initially to support the ship building product design process. QFD has been adapted and expanded to apply to any planning process that requires: ~ identification and prioritization (whys) ~ of possible responses (hows) ~ to a given set of objectives (whats). Other formal, systematic V-O-C processes exist. We use QFD to demonstrate one way to obtain customer inputs.

5. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 15 HKT  QFD Origin of the term Quality Function Deployment: Hinshitsu  quality; qualities; features; attributes Kino  function; mechanization Tenkai  deployment; diffusion; development; evolution So, somehow, we call this Quality Function Deployment, Not Attributes Mechanization Evolution

6. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 16 What specific problems are solved by QFD? Poor understanding of customer needs - ~ Solve the wrong problems, miss the big problems. Failure to strategically prioritize efforts - ~ No time and money left to solve the most important problems. Willingness to take on unmanageable risks - ~ Don’t know what we are committing to. Overreliance on formal specifications - ~ Spec often misses “contextual cues”, e.g., why are we building this? Fixing the wrong problems - ~ Often times forced to ship product before all bugs are eliminated, so did we fix enough of the most important bugs?

7. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 17 NOTE! QFD takes significant time and effort to do correctly. It is explicitly (visibly) time-consuming – meetings, reviews, delays. BUT… Every issue resolved by QFD before-the-fact.. Must be resolved after the fact if QFD (or some equivalent) is not used. Pay me now, or pay me later - with interest.

8. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 18 Purpose of QFD 1.Find out what your customer’s specific needs are (WHATs), 2.Determine the things you need to work on (HOWs), 3.Determine priorities of what you should work on (WHYS).

9. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 19 The following is an example of QFD applied to the “Perfect Mousetrap”, from QFD Designer. Example QFD

10. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 110 : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos. + : med. neg. # : str. neg. The Whole Nine Yards Please remain calm, it’s not that bad! Whys

11. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 111 Building a QFD Matrix It’s not as bad as it looks! You can build it one section at a time. –Phase 1: Whats –Phase 2: Hows –Phase 3: Whys Let’s look at the steps in building the matrix…

12. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 112 QFD Phase 1: Whats Phase 1: Whats Phase 2: Hows Phase 3: Whys

13. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 113 1. Gather WHATs - These are the desired effects you are trying to bring about. 2. Quantify WHAT Importances - Rated by customer. 3. Identify WHAT-WHAT Correlations - How do the WHATs affect each other? Controls expectations! Phase 1 : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos. + : med. neg. # : str. neg.

14. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 114 Comments: 1.Gather WHATS – These are effects you are trying to bring about, not problems and not solutions (that comes later). 2.Quantify WHAT Importances – Rated by the customer, not by you. 3.Identify WHAT-WHAT Correlations – Do with customers to control expectations. This explicitly highlights conflicting needs, which increases time and money needed to create solutions, and can cause compromises in product design. 4.After identifying negative correlations, the customer may want to revise the Importances, i.e., “Which of these two conflicting needs is really more important to you?”

15. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 115 Details of WHATs section Logical grouping of WHATs… A lecture later in the semester will address techniques for generating and grouping topics: - Affinity Diagram - Tree Diagram Eliminates MiceLuringEffective Luring Good Camouflage EffectivenessReliable Small Kills Quickly etc… Easy to UseEsy to Bait Easy to Set Easy to Empty etc… SafetySafe to Set Safe from Kids etc… ControlsGovernmentEPA etc…

16. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 116 5. Determine Required Improvement - Which really needs improvement?. 4. Gather Competitor Ratings - Your customer’s assessment of your current offering vs. your competitors’. Phase 1

17. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 117 Comments: 4.Gather Competitor Ratings – Again, this is your customer’s perspective of how you line up against your competitors on a need-by-need basis. - If you don’t have direct competitors, then this would be compared to the customer’s current approach, whatever it is. - If this need is not being met by anyone, note this. 5.Determine Required Improvement – Which important needs does the customer feel are not being adequately met? - Need may be high, but it may be that you and/or competitors are meeting the need, so customer is satisfied. - Need may not be satisfied, but need is low, so improvements would not be highly valued by the customer. We’ll discuss this element of QFD in greater detail later…

18. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 118 Thus Ends Phase 1 - Whats Phase 1

19. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 119 WHATs tend to show up in similar forms for different customers/applications/products, Thus, there will always be some basic commonality to the list of WHATs. You probably don’t need to start from scratch every time once you’ve done a few of these, You can probably build a common library of generic WHATs, Identifying WHATs in this structured environment gets much easier with experience! Hints on Identifying WHATs

20. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 120 QFD Phase 2 – HOWs Phase 1: Whats Phase 2: Hows Phase 3: Whys

21. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 121 6. Generate HOWs - measurable objectives that cause the desired effect – not solutions! 7. Determine CUSTOMER performance targets - How does your customer want the products to perform? Phase 2

22. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 122 Comments: 6.Generate HOWS – These are measurable objectives (measured in Step 7 below) that cause the desired effect, not solutions. - Generate HOWS by systematically going through each WHAT to find the measurable objectives (more on this later). 7.Determine CUSTOMER performance targets – This is how your customer wants the product to perform, not what you think is possible to do. - If your customer asks for the impossible, write it down! - Quantitative assessment is very important to controlling customer expectations!

23. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 123 Details on Product Characteristics Can be characterized as: - Performance Measurements - Product Functions - Process Steps Examine examples of each

24. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 124 Using Performance Measurements to Identify “Whats” For each customer need, define one or a few “technical performance measurements”, e.g.: How would I actually measure the ability to meet this need? Setting Force Easy to Set etc… (Others?) For each customer need… Identify technical performance measure

25. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 125 Using Product/Process Functions to Identify “Whats”. You can use Product/Process Functions instead of Performance Measurements if the product/service concept already exists, e.g., upgrade to an existing product in the field. Here’s an example… Functional groups The QFD row is “File Handling”. Functions These become the columns on the QFD matrix Defining Customer Performance Targets can be more challenging

26. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 126 Process QFD For process QFDs, the columns in the QFD can be process steps. Performance targets can be quantified by factors such as: ~ Average process step cycle time, ~ Average processing cost per cycle, ~ Average defect rate.

27. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 127 8. Determine HOW-HOW Correlations - How do the HOWs affect each other? 9. Determine Technical Difficulty - Where do we anticipate major hurdles? : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos. + : med. neg. # : str. neg. Phase 2 Controls expectations! Controls expectations (Internal and External)

28. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 128 Comments: 8.Determine HOW-HOW Correlations – Understanding how product characteristics reinforce and contradict one another is essential in assessing the technical difficulty in Step 9. 9.Determine Technical Difficulty – Technical difficulty is a relative “intuition” assessment involving: - Performance targets relative to current capabilities, - Positive and negative correlations among product characteristics, - Past experience. If your customer asked for the impossible in Step 7, note it here!

29. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 129 Here Ends Phase 2 – Hows Phase 2

30. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 130 QFQ Phase 3 – WHYs Phase 1: Whats Phase 2: Hows Phase 3: Whys

31. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 131 10. Determine WHAT-HOW Relationships - Rate how strongly each factor leads to each goal. 11. Calculate Relative Importance - Which HOWs should we work on? : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos. + : med. neg. # : str. neg. Phase 3

32. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 132 Comments: 8.Determine WHAT-HOW Correlations – This step allows the relative importance of product characteristics to be calculated by tying together the information from Phases 1 and 2. 9.Calculate Relative Importance – For the QualiSoft product, these numbers are automatically calculated based on all the ratings and weightings entered in the previous steps.

33. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 133 What-to-How Relationships - Detail If we defined the columns of the QFD as Performance Measures, and identify the performance measures based on each customer need, then we automatically identify the primary What-to-How relationships… Setting Force etc… Easy to Set etc…

34. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 134 A major benefit of the QFD is the ability to clearly identify secondary interactions : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos. + : med. neg. # : str. neg. Phase 3

35. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 135 End of Phase 3 – Whys Phase 3

36. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 136 Started by finding out exactly what your customer’s needs are... …and ended up knowing exactly what to work on first, next, etc…

37. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 137 Some extensions of QFD QFD Nesting Technical Benchmarking

38. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 138 QFD Nesting First Level QFD Second Level QFD

39. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 139 Possible Application of QFD Nesting We just did this QFD

40. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 140 QFD Extensions: Technical Benchmarking You can add a Technical Benchmarking row here

41. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 141 Adding Technical Benchmark Impacts Relative Importance

42. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 142 What specific problems are solved by QFD? Poor understanding of customer needs - ~ Solve the wrong problems, miss the big problems. Failure to strategically prioritize efforts - ~ No time and money left to solve the most important problems. Willingness to take on unmanageable risks and unbuildable designs - ~ Dn’t know what we are committing to. Overreliance on formal specifications - ~ Spec often misses “contextual cues”, e.g., why are we building this? Fixing the wrong problems - ~ Often times forced to ship product before all bugs are eliminated, so did we fix enough of the most important bugs?

43. WUT - Spring, 2007Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 143 Voice of the Customer Input Process: Purpose ~ Validate our perceptions and plans - what we do know. ~ Reveal unrecognized customer needs - what we don’t know. Desired Strengths ~ Systematic vs. anecdotal – turns over most of the rocks. ~ Fact-based vs. opinion-based prioritization of needs. Potential Weaknesses ~ Can create inappropriate customer expectations. ~ Risks compromising intellectual property – tip our hand. ~ Can keep us from being more inventive than our customers.