Voice-Of-The-Customer Process Part 1 Using Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

1. Voice-Of-The-Customer Process Part 1 Using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

2. An Integrated Strategic Technology Planningand Development Environment NewConceptIdeation TechnologyRoadmapping Voiceof theCustomer Stage GateTechnology Developmentand Review IntellectualPropertyGeneration Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

3. QFD Resources • We will be using a QFD format based on QFD Designer, available from IDEACore (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. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

4. 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 toany 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. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

5. 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 Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

6. 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? Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

7. 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. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

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

9. Example QFD • The following is an example of QFD applied to the“Perfect Mousetrap”, from QFD Designer. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

10. : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos.+ : med. neg.# : str. neg. The Whole Nine Yards Please remain calm, it’s not that bad! Whys Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

11. 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… Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

12. QFD Phase 1: Whats • Phase 1: Whats • Phase 2: Hows • Phase 3: Whys Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

13. : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos.+ : med. neg.# : str. neg. Phase 1 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! Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

14. Comments: • Gather WHATS – These are effects you are trying to bring about,not problems and not solutions (that comes later). • Quantify WHAT Importances – Rated by the customer, not by you. • 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 cancause compromises in product design. • 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?” Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

15. Eliminates Mice Luring Effective Luring Good Camouflage Effectiveness Reliable Small Kills Quickly etc… Easy to Use Esy to Bait Easy to Set Easy to Empty etc… Safety Safe to Set Safe from Kids etc… Controls Government EPA etc… 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 Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

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

17. Comments: • 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. • 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… Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

18. Thus Ends Phase 1 - Whats Phase 1 Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

19. Hints on Identifying WHATs • 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! Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

20. QFD Phase 2 – HOWsPhase 1: WhatsPhase 2: HowsPhase 3: Whys Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

21. Phase 2 7. Determine CUSTOMER performance targets - How does your customer want the products to perform? 6. Generate HOWs - measurable objectives that cause the desired effect – not solutions! Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

22. Comments: • 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). • 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! Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

23. Can be characterized as: - Performance Measurements - Product Functions - Process Steps Details on Product Characteristics Examine examples of each Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

24. Identify technical performance measure Setting Force For each customer need… Easy to Set etc… 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? (Others?) Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

25. The QFD row is “File Handling”. Functional groups These become the columns on the QFD matrix Functions 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… Defining Customer Performance Targets can be more challenging Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

26. 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. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

27. Controls expectations (Internal and External) Controls expectations! : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos.+ : med. neg.# : str. neg. 9. Determine Technical Difficulty - Where do we anticipate major hurdles? Phase 2 8. Determine HOW-HOW Correlations - How do the HOWs affect each other? Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

28. Comments: • Determine HOW-HOW Correlations – Understanding how product characteristics reinforce and contradict one another is essential in assessing the technical difficulty in Step 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! Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

29. Here Ends Phase 2 –Hows Phase 2 Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

30. QFQ Phase 3 – WHYs Phase 1: WhatsPhase 2: HowsPhase 3: Whys Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

31. : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos.+ : med. neg.# : str. neg. Phase 3 10. Determine WHAT-HOW Relationships - Rate how strongly each factor leads to each goal. 11. Calculate Relative Importance - Which HOWs should we work on? Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

32. Comments: • 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. • Calculate Relative Importance – For the QualiSoft product, these numbers are automatically calculated based on all the ratings and weightings entered in the previous steps. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

33. 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… etc… Setting Force Easy to Set etc… Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

34. : str. pos. : med. pos. : wk. pos.+ : med. neg.# : str. neg. Phase 3 A major benefit of the QFD is the ability to clearly identify secondary interactions Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

35. End of Phase 3 –Whys Phase 3 Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

36. Done! Started by finding out exactly what your customer’s needs are... …and ended up knowing exactly what to work on first, next, etc… Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

37. Some extensions of QFD • QFD Nesting • Technical Benchmarking Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

38. SecondLevelQFD QFD Nesting First Level QFD Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

39. Possible Application of QFD Nesting We just did this QFD Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

40. QFD Extensions: Technical Benchmarking You can add aTechnical Benchmarking row here Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

41. Adding Technical Benchmark Impacts Relative Importance Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

42. 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? Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1

43. 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. Voice-of-the-Customer Process - Part 1