This training is compatible with ISO-9001, Six Sigma, DFSS, Stage Gate, EFQM, TQM, Baldrige, and other quality initiatives. The attendees of this course are eligible to enroll in the 2023 QFD Black Belt® training if they so wish. Here is a partial list of the companies who have sent their employees to this training in the past.
The way traditional products and services have been designed, produced, and operated is now going through dramatic changes as software and information systems expand their roles.
For example, John Seabrook in his January 24 2022 New Yorker article “America’s Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric” reported Ford's new approach to designing and building its new F-150 Lightening trucks.
“This industry is overly focused on the propulsion change. But the real change is that we are moving to a software-defined experience for our customers,” Ford's CEO, Jim Farley was quoted in the article. “... the most important thing was that the software decided what kind of hardware got put on those machine... Ford will no longer wait for the next model change to rework a vehicle..."
The gist of the article, from a QFD perspective, is that hardware will be designed in the future to support the software, and not the other way around.
This means, these vehicles may come in “versions” where design changes are released on an ongoing basis, like other software-intensive products, affecting the entire supply chain for components and the entire value chain for after sales support and service/maintenance.
One can anticipate a broad range of ramification from this, including
the right to access proprietary software operating systems on mechanical
products such as automobiles, agricultural implements, and others by
product owners and non-dealer service technicians has been contentious,
and the Right-to-Repair laws for independent repair shops and car
owners, as well as most importantly, data security.
Recently the ISO 16355-7 standard for digitalized products and services has passed the draft stage. It is set for final publication in late 2022. There is a great urgency to this standard as the current information revolution is taking place across all industries.
For QFD practitioners, this presents opportunities for us to improve our methods. For example, a novel approach that includes hackers as one of the Voice of Customers is being studied by three QFD experts at the International Academy for Quality. Their research will be shared in the next QFD symposium and/or in the QFD newsletter.
Fast approaching is the 22nd ISQFD on September 9-10, 2016 in Boise, Idaho USA.
Important trendy topics will be a focus of this year's presentations, including the Internet of Things (Iot), ISO 16355, Complex Systems Engineering, Sustainable Energy System Development, Corporate Strategy Deployment, 3D Virgual Reality Prototyping, and more.
Please join us for learning new things, to get inspired and engage in discussions in a supportive environment.
ASQ TV has just produced a video on the new ISO 16355 standard. Here is a glimpse of some of the things that will be presented, discussed, and taught in the Symposium, as well as QFD Green Belt® and QFD Black Belt® courses.
New product developers and Lean / Six Sigma professionals should not miss this opportunity to gain solid knowledge of the new ISO 16355 first-hand from the convenor of the ISO committee.
You (training attendees) will also get the QFD templates, the ISO 16355 1,000-page reference bibiliography and case studies, and the international symposium is free for the Boise course attendees!!
We are pleased to announce that ISO 16355, the first
ISO standard for QFD, has won full approval, just a few weeks ago at the
International Standard Organization meeting in London UK.
This standard is intended to guide both novice and veteran product and
process developers who use QFD, including practitioners of Six Sigma,
Lean Six Sigma, and Design for Six Sigma.
One of the important aspects is the decision by the ISO working group to make this standard in descriptive rather than prescriptive, so
as to expose practitioners to the full depth and breadth of the QFD
concepts and methodology, and not limit to one particular model.
This decision came from the recognition that we cannot be successful in the future products development when bound by old methods and mindsets, while the world around us is going through rapid changes. For example, a wall-sized House of Quality that worked well forty years
ago is no longer effective for today's agile and IT-oriented
businesses.
Therefore, any approach to new
product development must continue to transform over time for a business
to survive and sustain success. Our working group decided early on to make this new
standard stand the test of time in this regard, and open the eyes of QFD
practitioners to multiple broad possibilities and options from which
they can find a feasible best path for their unique situation, such as Akao's Comprehensive QFD, modern Blitz QFD®, and the
German QFD models.
In a business magazine interview, the new Omron president, Mr. Ogino, described not only innovation in their new products displayed at the the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but also advances in the company's core beliefs about
customers and product development.
Omron is an international medical device manufacturer that sells home healthcare devices such as blood pressure monitors, body weight and composition meters, and others.
Under Mr. Ogino's directives, Omron product developers now must investigate the validity of product
concept from the customer's perspective and identify "true" customer
needs. No longer are
product features such as 'integrated,' 'compact,' 'easy to read,' and
so forth sufficient.
"Tens of thousands people end up with amputations
every year because of high blood sugar. We make blood glucose meters to
make such incidents zero. We make nebulizers with a conviction to cure
asthma during childhood. I make sure in our company that no product
planning takes place without first making clear why we should make the
product, what is the ultimate goal," says Mr. Ogino.
This new mindset, code-named "Project Zero" (meaning driving down
users' adverse health events to zero), will not only help the company differentiate itself from other wearable technology manufacturers, but also it can bring them closer to becoming in compliance with the new ISO 16355 for QFD. Here is how... Read the full article.
Single-serving coffee brewers have become so popular recently. It is everywhere from home kitchens, hotel rooms, airport lounges, to doctors' offices, etc.
You insert a small disposable coffee pod (the photo on the left) into the machine, push a button, and out comes fresh brewed coffee with the flavor, strength, and style described on the package.
People love the convenience, easy care, and fresh coffee aroma with each cup. But have you ever thought of the environmental impact after their use?
Made of plastic and/or aluminum, some pods can be recycled, while others are not. But how often have you seen a recycle bin provided in hotel rooms or offices where these single brewers are used? How many people carefully sort out the recyclable pods during the morning rush?
The sad reality is that the majority of these pods currently end up in landfill — now a 3,000,000,000 per year problem in Germany alone, according to March 1, 2016 National Public Radio blog "The Salt".
In New Product Development, the concern for sustainability is too often treated as an 'either-or' tradeoff, such as "you can have convenience or environmental friendliness, but not both".
But you can resolve this dilemma and do a better job at designing sustainability in your new product by using Comprehensive QFD and deploying Sustainability independently during the design phase.
Those with Modern QFD training can also supplement the Maximum Value table in Blitz QFD® with an Environmental Value table.
ASQ's annual congress will again take place this May in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA.
Mark your calendar for May 17, 2016 at 4 pm–5 pm as Glenn Mazur, executive director of the QFD Institute, will present "ISO 16355: A Standard for Innovative Customer Experience." It will be in "T30: Customer Experience Track."
By the way, companies with international business and those who lead corporate efforts in Design for Six/Lean Sigma (DFSS/DFLS) should also consider attending the March 22–23, 2016 QFD Green Belt® Course, to develop the skills needed to achieve 21st century levels of innovation and quality in their new products and comply with the new standard.
In addition to the modern QFD software templates and case studies, students of the March 2016 QFD course will receive the ISO 16355-1 Tools Matrix reference eBook ($149 value). This course has no prerequisites. Registration is here.
Last year we discussed the "Taxi of Tomorrow," New York City's taxi design contest. We called attention to the peril of new product development without understanding stakeholders and offered some QFD perspectives.
Now that the winning model (Nissan) is being rolled out to replace the aging fleet of NYC cabs, are New Yorkers happy? Not so fast. The debate continues.
Taxi of Tomorrow
Nissan NV200 photo: mr.chopper / wikipedia
The Nissan model (photo right), based on a Japanese family van never tested in a commercial fleet until now, offers features such as a spacious interior, rear seat airbags, driver GPS, and charging ports for electronic devices.
The critics complained that the Nissan model is only a gasoline fueled vehicle (at least for now) and does not offer wheelchair accessibility.
Intriguingly, it caught our eyes that the contest decision makers (politicians, taxi and limousine commissioners, industry leaders) gravitated toward the established, practical product features for the final selection, such as Safety, Comfort, Passenger and Driver Amenities, and Economy.
In the pre-decision survey, the general public additionally voiced these important features: Environmental friendliness and forward-looking design fit for the international center of business, arts, and tourism.
What neither party articulated, during and after the contest, were the true needs of customers, especially the "latent" needs.
That may be why Uber, Lyft, and others are able to make a dent in the market share of traditional taxis. Note here, what types of vehicle it is or what amenities it is equipped with are no longer the differentiating points in this new competition.
This may come as shocking to those who worked hard to bring the winning design onto the streets of Manhattan. But with the entry of this new app-based, on-demand competition, the physical features that the Taxi of Tomorrow has focused have become irrelevant — as if the Taxi of Tomorrow addresses the needs of yesterday!
The city officials are hopeful the new taxi will bring back customers, but it seems they need more than an eye-catching new design to successfully compete in this new market.
How can they turn the Taxi of Tomorrow truly live up to its name? Read more...
Many people wrongly assume that so-called Kano model (diagram on the right) describes the relationship between customer needs, fulfillment of product features, and satisfaction.
The1984 research, "Attractive Quality and Must-Be Quality" by N. Seraku, F. Takahashi, and N. Kano, Ph.D., measured satisfaction merely against the existence or absence of a feature. It did not and does not address customer needs.
Additionally, the Kano categories came from customer survey responding to inverse-paired questions. They were not and are not assigned by product engineers or producers.
The most serious error that people often make is the misleading "curved-arrow" that is often cited as shown in the above diagram. The inverse-paired question yields only two data points: the "if" and the "if not". You can only draw a line (= linear) with two data points. It takes three data points to inscribe a curve! This is why Glenn Mazur (QFD Institute), who translated Kano's original Japanese paper into English over two decades ago, wonders how many people who cite the Kano model actually read their study.
This problems was addressed by Mr. Harold Ross, a now retired General Motors engineer and a director of the QFD Institute. He called this the New Kano Model, which adds the necessary questions to draw the "curve" and use it to reveal hidden market segments and extrapolate better design decisions.
Using the Modern QFD tools that are taught in the QFD Black Belt® course, you can then identify the invisible, moving target of customer satisfaction that the original Kano model does not address.
This new methodology will be presented at the 26th Symposium on QFD, December 5, 2014 in Charleston, South Carolina USA. It will include implementation examples of automotive industry, development of marketing and advertising content, as well as identifying clearer performance targets for each customer segment.
Everyone is welcomed at this symposium, regardless of your QFD knowledge.
Here is how to attend.
You've earned your Spring Break from the coldest, snowiest winter in recent memory.
Come to Orlando, Florida for the next QFD Green Belt® training course on March 6–7, 2014.
Learn modern QFD tools to translate voice of customer into unspoken customer needs, get accurate priorities, and operationalize innovative solutions to what matters most.
Blitz QFD® uses simple Excel sheets (provided) to feed into, and often replace, the House of Quality and other matrices. Can be applied to systems, modules, components — for hardware, software, service, and healthcare. Bring your own project for the workshops.
Workshop 1: Defining project goals and outcomes. (Project Goals Table)
Workshop 2: Defining key customers and stakeholders, and their applications/scenarios. (Customer Segments Table)
Workshop 3: Planning customer visits (gemba) to see for ourselves, and model what they say and do. (Customer Process Model)
Workshop 4: Documenting what goes right (and is to be protected) and wrong (and is to be improved) based on voice of customer and observational study. (Gemba Visit Table)
Workshop 5: Translate voice of customer into true customer needs, both spoken and unspoken. (Customer Voice Table)
Workshop 6: Structure customers needs to find missing ones. (Affinity Diagram and Hierarchy Diagram).
In my opinion, late Steve Jobs was a rare individual who had such an intuitive grasp of the fundamentals of QFD thinking. For example, in the April 1, 1989 interview with Inc. Magazine, he was asked by reporters Bo Burlingham and George Gendron, "Where do great products come from?"
This is what Jobs said:
"I think really great products come from melding two points of view-the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both.
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new. It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them-not something they'd want now..."
Let me put this in QFD perspective.
We see two common flows in the way QFD is practiced: forward and reverse. Forward QFD begins with the voice of the customer which is often a mixture of "what they want," that is product performance, features, and technology. Because customers rarely know what the future may bring, their voice is typically tied to the past or present.
As Jobs points out, the product may be sufficient for the past, but insufficient at the time of launch or during its useful life. You can ask customers what they want as a starting point of a QFD analysis. The tool for this analysis is the Customer Voice table; its purpose is to translate voice of customer (VOC) into true customer needs. In this table, we explore with customers why they want something.
Japanese manufactures are excellent at developing integral type products, such as cars and complicated machines that need fine tuning (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing machines). However, many products are currently shifting toward modular systems which require better architectures and modularity logic and rules. This presentation will show how to better define modular product architectures through the analytic structure of QFD, specifically how to arrange many complex issues such as customer needs, cost, technology, manufacturing feasibility, serviceability and so forth in a series of matrices so that modularity can be better simulated.
Keywords: QFD, Modularity, Modular, Integral Components, Modular Design, JAPAN
Quality Function Deployment for New Product Development: Transforming Waste to Worth
This paper reports an application of QFD by the Thailand's chemical industry leader, SCG Chemicals. The company was able to develop a new eco-friendly construction material out of a chemical byproduct waste. The new product not only offers added functional value but also is boosting the customer's brand image. The presentation will report an application of QFD for this New Product Development, most challengingly in eliciting the needs from psychological elements and deploying them into design specifications, development process, souring, and other considerations for successful product roll-out.
Top technology is not all we need for a successful business: QFD logic, methods and tools —Dutch experience.
This presentation will report a pilot project in The Netherlands, the utilization of QFD for business development. The talk will share the Dutch experience of the customer-centered marketing campaigns based on the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Modern QFD techniques. This approach provided the logical, systematic, and interactive links between the commercial and technology teams in one organization.
Keywords: Modern QFD, Business Development, Business Analysis, VOC, THE NETHERLANDS
Application of QFD for the Development of An Organic Product: A Pilot Study
This presentation will report a pilot QFD application for the development of an organic product. A conceptual model which consists of four matrices for the development of an organic fruit jelly will be presented. The main adaptation is in the first matrix to include major actors in the production supply chain. The first results indicate the feasibility of the proposal for food development.
Keywords: Product Development, Organic Products, QFD, BRAZIL
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.
In a study by Barry Brown of the Mobile Life Center in Sweden, “The Normal Natural Troubles of Driving With GPS,” global positioning system failures were often found to be the result of driver errors, such as wrong inputs, misreading display, etc.
The study is cited in a recent New York Times article by Randall Stross, a business professor at San Jose State University, that concludes that no technology will ever eradicate this human error.
The article described Dr. Brown's field study of installing video cameras in test vehicles to capture the GPS instructions, drivers' responses, and conversations when things went wrong. In QFD, we call this "going to gemba" or the place where unscripted user behavior reveals the real truth about customer needs. Gemba visits should be done prior to development to gain knowledge, as well as during design to test and validate solutions.
The conclusion by Dr. Stross reminded me of Dr. Noriaki Kano's model of Attractive Quality Creation, where he introduced the concept of exciting and expected quality. QFD users, of course, are very familiar with the classical Kano model as well as the QFD Institute's modern New Kano Model.
Dr. Kano cites one of his early experiments with Mr. T. Yoneyama of Konica, the Japanese camera company that later merged with Minolta.
In their study at film processing and photograph printing labs (also a gemba), they noticed that the largest number of poor quality pictures were those that were out of focus or under exposed. These problems were operator error, not mechanical failures of the camera. Most of these photographs were taken by amateurs who did not have the professional skills to adjust the camera properly, but never complained to the lab or to the camera maker.
Like in the GPS study, Konica could have just blamed the unskilled customers. But with Dr. Kano's guidance, they did something different – they introduced the built-in auto flash in 1974 and the auto focus in 1977, thus revolutionizing the amateur and later professional camera industry.
In other words, if products or services fail to satisfy, makers should adopt this attitude that their design is at fault, not their customers. Positively stated, these failures are actually opportunities to create exciting products with disruptive technologies.
