Designing Products & Engineering

Designing Products &Engineering

The Overall Goal • Increase customer satisfaction = • Increase business success

QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT Getting from the voice of the customer to technical design specifications • Quality Function Deployment • Voice of the customer • House of quality QFD: An approach that integrates the “voice of the customer” into the product and service development process.

QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT • Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a technique introduced in Japan by Yoji Akao in 1966 and initially used extensively by Toyota • According to Akao (1990), QFD "is a method for developing a design quality aimed at satisfying the consumer and then translating the consumer's demand into design targets and major quality assurance points to be used throughout the production phase". • It is a structured procedure used to translate the expressed or perceived needs of customers first into specific product or service design characteristics and features, and then into process and operational characteristics.

Strengths and Benefits of Quality Function Deployment • QFD seeks out both "spoken" and "unspoken" customer requirements and maximizes "positive" quality (such as ease of use, fun, luxury) that creates value. • Instead of conventional design processes that focus more on engineering capabilities and less on customer needs, QFD focuses all product development activities on customer needs. • QFD makes invisible requirements and strategic advantages visible. This allows a company to prioritize and deliver on them.

Strengths and Benefits of Quality Function Deployment • Reduced time to market. • Reduction in design changes. • Decreased design and manufacturing costs. • Improved quality. • Increased customer satisfaction.

Usage of the Quality Function Deployment method Applications • To prioritize customer demands and customer needs, spoken and unspoken • Translating these needs into actions and designs such as technical characteristics and specifications • To build and deliver a quality product or service, by focusing various business functions toward achieving a common goal of customer satisfaction • QFD has been applied in many industries: aerospace, manufacturing, software, communication, IT, chemical and pharmaceutical, transportation, defense, government, R&D, food, and service industry.

Limitations and Disadvantages of Quality Function Deployment. • As with other Japanese management techniques, some problems can occur when we apply QFD within the western business environment and culture. • Customer perceptions are found by market surveys. If the survey is performed in a poor way, then the whole analysis may result in doing harm to the firm. • The needs and wants of customers can change quickly. A comprehensive system and methodical thinking can make adapting to changed market needs more complex.

Assumptions of Quality Function Deployment. • The market survey results are accurate. • Customer needs can be documented and captured, and they remain stable during the whole process.

Four Important Points to Understand Before Implementation of QFD 1. No matter how well the design team thinks it understands the problem, it should employ the QFD method for all design areas. In the process the team will learn what it doesn’t know about the problem. 2. The customer’s requirements must be translated into measurable design targets. You can’t design a car door that is “easy to open” when you don’t know the meaning of the word “easy”.

Four Important Points to Understand Before Implementation of QFD (con’t) 3. The QFD method can be applied to the entire problem and/or any sub-problem. 4. It is important to worry about what needs to be designed and, only after this is fully understood, to worry about how the design will look and work.

What QFD can do … Our cognitive capabilities generally lead us to try to assimilate the customer’s functional requirements (what is to be designed) in terms of form (how it will look). These images then become our favored designs and we get locked into them. The QFD procedure helps us to overcome this cognitive limitation.

The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Technique 1. Identifying the customer(s) 2. Determining customer requirements 3. Prioritizing the requirements 4. Competition benchmarking 5. Translating the customer requirements into measurable engineering requirements 6. Setting engineering targets for design

Step 1: Identifying the Customer(s) – Who is the customer? In addition to the person buying the product, the customers of the design engineer would also include the manufacturing and assembly engineers and workers. (or anyone else downstream of the design process).

Step 2: Determining Customer Requirements – The goal is to develop a list of all the customer requirements (made up in the customer’s own words) that will affect the design. This should be accomplished with the whole design team, based on the results of customer surveys.

Kano Model - used to understand the importance of design characteristics to a customer • Basic Needs • Performance Needs • Excitement Needs

Basic Needs Some of these needs are so fundamental, they are often not expressed by the customer. However, they are crucial and must be identified. The best that we can expect by meeting these is a consumer that is not unhappy. Performance Needs These provide increased satisfaction as performance improves. They are generally expressed by the consumer. Excitement Needs These cause immediate happiness. Needs of this type are typically not verbalized. Creation of some excitement features in a design will differentiate your product from the competition.

Customers’ Requirements • Normal Requirements are typically what we get by just asking customers what they want. • Expected Requirements are often so basic the customer may fail to mention them - until we fail to perform them. For example, if coffee is served hot, customers barely notice it. If it's cold or too hot, dissatisfaction occurs. Expected requirements must be fulfilled. • Exciting Requirements are difficult to discover. They are beyond the customer's expectations. For example, if full meals were served on a flight from Chicago to Indianapolis, that would be exciting. If not, customers would hardly complain.

Kano’s Paired Questions • Ask the customer to consider a set of paired questions. • The first question asks how you feel if something exists. • 2. The second question asks how you feel if something does not exist.

Example: • Use 1-5 to answer: • I really like it • I like it • I feel neutral • I do not like it • I really do not like it • 1. How do you feel if the instructor has a good sense of humor? (answer: ex. 1) • 2. How do you feel if the instructor presents much useful information? (answer: ex. 3)

Example: • Use A-E to answer: • I really like it • I like it • I feel neutral • I do not like it • I really do not like it • 3. How do you feel if the instructor does not have a good sense of humor? (answer: ex. C) • 4. How do you feel if the instructor does not present much useful information? (answer: ex. E)

Example: (con’t) The first and third questions are paired and evaluate instructor humor. They are useful in identifying humor as an excitement or performance need. The second and fourth questions are also paired evaluating useful information given by the instructor. These questions allow you to identify information as a basic or performance need.

Step 3: Prioritizing the Requirements - A weighting factor is generated for each requirement. The weighting factor will give the designer an idea of how much effort, time, and money to invest in achieving each requirement. Two questions should be addressed in developing a prioritization (1) To whom is the requirement important? (2) How is a measure of importance developed for this diverse group of requirements?

Step 4: Competition Benchmarking The goal here is to determine how the customer perceives the competition’s ability to meet each of the requirements. This forces awareness of what already exists and points out opportunities for improving upon that which already exists. Each competing product is compared with customer requirements. Some comparisons are objective and others are subjective.

Below is a possible scale for rating the competition’s product based on customer requirements. 1 = the design does not meet the requirement at all 2 = the design meets the requirement slightly 3 = the design meets the requirement somewhat 4 = the design meets the requirement mostly 5 = the design meets the requirement completely

Step 5: Translating the Customer Requirements into Measurable Engineering Requirements The goal here is to develop a set of engineering requirements (often called design specifications) that are measurable for use in evaluating the proposed designs. 1. Transform the customer requirements into engineering requirements. 2. Make sure that the engineering requirements are measurable.

Step 6: Setting Engineering Targets for Design • The last step is to determine the target values for engineering measurement. To do this: • 1. Ascertain how the competition meets the engineering targets, • 2. Establish a target value for the new product. • Measurements of the competition’s targets provide a basis for the development of targets for the new product. • The best targets are those set for a specific value. • Less precise, but still usable, are those targets set within a range. • A third type of target is a value made to be as large or small as possible.

House Of Quality The House of Quality is a popular collection of several deployment hierarchies and tables. It has the form of a table that connects dots between the “Voice of the Customer” and the “Voice of the Engineer.” The House of Quality is used by multidisciplinary teams to translate a set of customer requirements, using market research and benchmarking data, into an appropriate number of prioritized engineering targets to be met by a new product design.

House Of Quality • The House of Quality is a sort of conceptual map, which provides means to the interfunctional planning and coordination of product improvement and product development. In a way this method brings the customer needs in the focus to design or to redesign the product and service. • In this method the starting point would be the customer needs which are found from any market research survey about the product in question. Primary, secondary and tertiary customer attributes are found. These form the base of the house. • Corresponding engineering characteristics are specified which should be in clear measurable terms.

House Of Quality • Now the interdependencies are mapped which are in the form of the roof of the house. • Accordingly, technical difficulties in achieving the desired changes are calculated. • With the help of imputed importance of each characteristic the cost is worked out. • Then final targets are set in clear measurable terms. • In essence, with the help of customer needs, the product is redesigned in clear unequivocal measurable terms.

Marketing Competitive assessment House Of Quality Correlation Matrix Product Characteristics HOW Customer Requirements WHAT Relationship matrix How Much Engineering Competitive Assessment

The House of Quality contains six major components: 1. Customer requirements (HOW`s). A structured list of requirements derived from customer statements. 2. Technical requirements (WHAT`s). A structured set of relevant and measurable product characteristics. 3. Planning matrix. Illustrates customer perceptions observed in market surveys. Includes relative importance of customer requirements, and company and competitor performance in meeting these requirements.

The House of Quality contains six major components: 4. Interrelationship matrix. Illustrates the QFD team's perceptions of interrelationships between technical and customer requirements. An appropriate scale is applied, which is illustrated by using symbols or figures. To fill this portion of the matrix involves discussions and to build consensus within the team, which can be time consuming. Concentrating on key relationships and minimizing the numbers of requirements are useful techniques to reduce the demands on resources. 5. Technical correlation (Roof) matrix. Used to identify where technical requirements support or impede each other in the product design. Can highlight innovation opportunities.

The House of Quality contains six major components: • 6. Technical priorities, benchmarks and target are used to record: • The priorities assigned to technical requirements by the matrix. • Measures of technical performance achieved by competitive products. • The degree of difficulty involved in developing each requirement. • The final output of the matrix is a set of target values for each technical requirement to be met by the new design, which are linked back to the demands of the customer.

Marketing Competitive assessment House Of Quality Correlation Matrix Product Characteristics HOW Customer Requirements WHAT Relationship matrix How Much Engineering Competitive Assessment

The “What” room • Implies the voice of the customer, located at the left portion of the matrix. • It answers the question, “What requirements should be satisfied, or are there any special features which the customer would be delighted to discover?”

The “How” room • Voice of the Engineers or Designers (“hows”). • Each "whats" item must be converted (refined) to “how(s)” • They have to be actionable (quantifiable or measurable) • It is located under the “Correlation Matrix” roof. It answers the question, “How can these customer requirements be met in terms of design requirements?”

The “Relationship Matrix” • It is the linkage between the engineering design requirements and voice of the customer. • Correlates how “hows” satisfy “whats” • Use symbolic notation for depicting weak, medium, and strong relationships • Generally, • A circle within a circle indicates a strong correlation between the two. • A single circle shows a moderate correlation • A triangle represents a weak correlation.

The “How Much” room • “How much’s" of the “Hows“ (measurement) • Answers a common design question: "How much is good enough (to satisfy the customer)?“ • located in the box beneath the relationship matrix. • Clearly stated in a measurable way as to how customer requirements are met • Provides designers with specific technical guidance

The “Correlation Matrix” roof • Identifies how “hows” items support (positive) or conflict (negative) with one another • Find trade-offs for negative items by adjusting “how much” values. • Trade-offs must be resolved or customer requirements won’t be fully satisfied. • There are two consequences of a negative correlation. • The first consequence is to redesign the product in order to eliminate the tradeoffs. • The second consequence is to determine an optimization target in which the design tradeoffs are included with their relative importance to the customer considered.

The “Engineering Competitive Assessment” room • collects the data in engineering terms and records it on the chart. Each item is scaled separately as it relates to its relative merit for each test from good to poor. The “Engineering Competitive Assessment” room is recorded below the “How Much” room and corresponds to the “How” room column. An importance rating is assigned to each test on a certain scale.

The “Marketing Competitive Assessment” room • Also called the “Customer Competitive Assessment” room. Its location is next to the “Relationship Matrix” room. • This competitive benchmarking helps identify the current best-in-class designs as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each design. A weighted scale is also applied to the system.

An Example with Completed QFD Matrices:Product Planning Matrix for Pencil

BEFORE AND AFTER QFD BEFORE QFD AFTER QFD PLANNING DESIGN REDESIGN MANUFACTURING PLANNING DESIGN REDESIGN MANUFACTURING BENEFITS Development time $$ Customer satisfaction KEY DIFFERENCES Before QFD After QFD sequential development simultaneous development across functions function involvement by phase all functions participate from start management approval by phase team empowered to make decisions tasks assigned by function tasks shared across functions functionally led decisions consensus decisions about trade-offs presentation meetings working meetings to develop results jointly customer needs not integrated focus on customer needs carried throughout

To Build House of Quality • Identify customer wants • Identify how the good/service will satisfy customer wants. • Relate the customer’s wants to the product’s hows. • Develop importance ratings • Evaluate competing ideas and concepts Ultimately you choose the design Not the customer!

House of Quality Example What the customer desires (‘wall’) Customer Requirements Customer Importance Light weight Easy to use Reliable Target Values

House of Quality Example Average customer importance rating Customer Requirements Customer Importance 50 Light weight 30 Easy to use 20 Reliable Target Values

Steel Parts Aluminum Parts Auto Focus Auto Exposure House of Quality Example Choose engineering characteristics to satisfy thecustomer requirements Customer Requirements Customer Importance 50 Light weight 30 Easy to use 20 Reliable Target Values

Steel Parts Aluminum Parts Auto Exposure Auto Focus House of Quality Example Relationship between customer attributes & engineering characteristics (‘rooms’) Customer Requirements Customer Importance 2 50 Light weight 5 8 7 30 Easy to use 4 8 5 3 20 Reliable 330 260 340 270 Target Values

Designing Products & Engineering