ISO QFD Training: Public Courses

Compliance with ISO standards is a critical issue in today's global marketplace. ISO compliance assures that customers and suppliers are speaking the same "language," managing expectations, and agreeing on standards of performance.

For those responsible for product development, compliance with the new ISO 16355 is highly critical. This standard includes today's state-of-art QFD best practices, which have long evolved from the familiar House of Quality made popular in the 1970s.

The impact of this standard is huge, and providers of goods and services who comply will have a tremendous advantage in the marketplace.

Quality professionals including Six Sigma, Lean Sigma, DfSS, and DfLS are uniquely qualified to implement this standard. Many of the methods and tools you use to improve your internal operations can now be re-purposed to improve your customer's operations and products. This shifts the financial impact from cost reduction to revenue creation, an almost unlimited opportunity.

ISO 16355-1:2015 was released in December 2015. Parts 2, 4, 5, and 8 are in pre-publication phase and expected by the end of 2016 or early 2017. The remaining parts should follow soon after.

Now is the time to get ahead of your competitors on ISO 16355 compliance.
 
Two public courses are coming up, taught by the convener of the ISO 16355 Working Group.  We encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity.

• September 7-8, 2016
  QFD Green Belt^® training
  Hampton Inn Boise Downtown in Boise, Idaho USA
  PDF Brochure      |     Registration
  
  Internationally acclaimed introductory workshop for ISO 16355 and Modern Blitz QFD^®. This course has no prerequisites. Includes modern QFD templates, ISO 13655 bibliography materials with case studies, plus the 2-day International Symposium on QFD (Sept 9-10).
  

• September 12-16, 2016
  QFD Black Belt^® training
  Hampton Inn Boise Downtown in Boise, Idaho USA
  PDF Brochure      |     Registration
  
  Advanced training for the current and future project leaders, DFLS/DFSS champions, corporate trainers, and anyone who seek to develop advanced NPD and CRM skills. This course may be attended without prerequisites by selecting the "Facilitator's Package." Otherwise, prerequisites apply.
  
  Registration of this course also includes the International Symposium on QFD (Sept 9-10) at the same venue, modern QFD templates, ISO 13655 bibliography materials with case studies, and the entire set of the symposium transactions from 1989 to 2016.

Upcoming Public QFD Courses — Learn today's best methods and tools

All events listed here will be held at Charleston Marriott in Charleston, South Carolina USA. The 1-day Symposium on December 5, 2014 is complimentary to the course attendees.

Registration Page.
For questions, please contact the QFD Institute.
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QFD Green Belt^® Certificate Course
December 3–4,  2014  (Wed & Thurs)

• Your chance to learn Modern Blitz QFD^®.  
• Learn how to do QFD analysis without the outdated 4-house matrices, without the resource-consuming House of Quality matrix.
• Learn how to do a Gemba and VOC analysis, correctly identify and prioritize customer needs, transform them into design specifications of customer-value and innovative solutions, deploy them throughout your new product/service development process — with agility and efficiency essential to today's lean environment. 
• Templates included (modern QFD, AHP, modern House of Quality, Maximum Value Table, and more).
• No Prerequisites.

QFD Black Belt^® Certificate Course
December 8–12,  2014  (Monday - Friday)

• Advanced QFD training for DFLS/DFSS black belts and master black belts, trainers, facilitators, innovation leaders, corporate training scouts, and anyone who is inspired to be a project leader.  
• Learn the full depth and breadth of Modern Comprehensive QFD, including detailed instructions on how to correctly deploy a House of Quality matrix for its full power, with correct data input and prioritization.
• Learn how to expertly integrate your own process and other quality and design methods such as DFLS, Hoshin, Kansei Engineering, TRIZ, Critical Chain, six sigma DMAIC, StageGates, DFMEA and more. 
• Templates included (modern QFD, AHP, modern House of Quality, Maximum Value Table, and more), and over 1,000 pages of training manual.
• Prerequisites: Qualified graduates of the QFD Green Belt^® Courses.

If you have attended the above courses more than three years ago, now is the time to refresh your knowledge and skills in these semi-private coaching sessions:

• QFD Green Belt^® Update Course is the continuing education for QFD Green Belt^® graduates. This half-day course is conveniently scheduled on December 7, 2014, 4 PM - 7:30 PM.
• QFD Black Belt^® Update Course is the continuing education for QFD Black Belt^® graduates. Attendees of this full-day course on December 7, 2014 receive the latest copy of both QFD Green Belt^® and QFD Black Belt^® training manuals.

We look forward to meeting you in these Charleston QFD events.

The joke is on us (consumers)

Take a look at this video. It is about a Google Japan project to develop a better interface for typing Japanese.

Owning to its complex writing system (several thousand Chinese characters mingled with two sets of 51 phonetic alphabets), keyboarding Japanese became feasible only in 1970s. Even today with advancements in software and AI, typing Japanese remains highly cumbersome, compared to Romance languages such as English, Spanish, French, etc.

So when Google Japan announced its intention to design a better way to type, the project sounded like a worthy effort.


Google Japan video, April 2013 (http://youtu.be/HzUDAaYMNsA)  Click "CC" for English caption.

Have you noticed the intriguing initial concept based on drum-playing? Granted, Google has always been known for quirky ideation, but many Japanese viewers thought this was an absurd, if interesting, departure from the traditional keyboard.

Alas, the complexity of the Japanese language necessitated infinite drums to be added (to accommodate thousands of characters), resulting in an inoperably massive drum assembly. Did you see that?

To solve this problem, the Google engineers did what many project teams typically do: They gathered in a meeting room to brainstorm.

Does it sound pretty normal to you, so far?

After many days of brainstorming, one day while waiting for a commuter train, an engineer had an epiphany: A split-flap input display system (the old-fashioned mechanism that flips panels to display departure/arrival information for trains, airplanes, etc.).

Did you see that?

Then comes the really eccentric part: Since people today prefer everything mobile, the Google team decides to build this new Japanese input system in the form of funky eye wear (Google glasses for the 19th century)!  Now you can type Japanese wherever you are simply by blinking your eyes.

See that?  What else did you notice?

The real scoop is, while users of Gmail in the US were greeted with the total ‘blue’ screen prank on April Fools’ Day, Google Japan made an elaborate effort to produce this video prank instead. What is interesting is that many people failed to discern the joke.

We showed this video to our colleagues in Japan, many whom are professors of Information Technology and Business. Here is what they said, which also resembles the comments of many Japanese Youtube viewers:

“It is an interesting concept, but I found it difficult to understand.”
“It looks hard to use for me, but young people like this?”
“The initial drum concept looked interesting; it is too bad that the final product departed from it.”
“Who is the wholesaler of this product? Can I get in touch?”

People did not get the joke, perhaps, because even today real life product development often resembles what the Google team portrayed in the video. That is, a team of experts gathers in a meeting room, discusses product ideas out of thin air, brainstorms design issues with each other, and eventually (hopefully) someone has a lucky break for a final product idea that might reflect solutions to the engineering problems at hand, but pay little regard to customer gemba and their real needs.

Without knowledge of customer-centric approaches like QFD and practical experience of how to implement the DFCV (design for customer value) such as gemba tools and maximum value table in Blitz QFD^®, the product development in this April Fools’ video came across to many as a rather reasonable, realistic way that many businesses still conduct product development. I hope yours is different.

Learn better ways of product development… QFD Green Belt^® Certificate Course

DFSS / DFLS and QFD: Why we need both

A recent QFD newsletter discussed the similarities and differences of DFSS/DFLS and QFD and why it is not an "either-or" question but that we need both to deliver business success.

This is because the focus of DFSS (design for six sigma) and DFLS (design for lean sigma) is our internal products and processes, whereas the focus of QFD (quality function deployment) is our customers. The differences between the sigma approaches and QFD are especially notable in these areas:

• Focus
• Customer understanding
• VOC (voice of customer) analysis
• CRM (customer requirements management) and priority
• Solutions identification and delivery
• Design, Development, and Commercialization
• Math

In short, QFD provides a holistic approach that links business, customer, and technology in one end-to-end trackable flow with the goal of customer value — DFCV (design for customer value). QFD uses quantitative and non-quantitative tools to analyze the unknown unknowns, information that leads to sustainable competitiveness.

DFSS provides a powerful set of statistical and analytic tools that can improve the efficiencies and effectiveness during the build of new products. QFD provides the umbrella of customer value as the driver and DFSS kicks in downstream to assure that solutions are optimally developed. We need both together in order to deliver customer satisfaction and business success.

Here is the detailed comparison of the sigma and QFD approaches and the reasons why we must use both: "DFSS/DFLS and QFD"