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In the previous issue, we looked at an early
QFD example by an auto manufacturer, presented in 1992 at the 2nd
Symposium on QFD in Novi, Michigan, USA.
Ten years later, a case study of advanced QFD application was
presented at the 12th Symposium on QFD (2002) in San Diego, this time
by an automotive supplier.
Unlike the earlier example which followed a simpler four-phase QFD
model, this one exploited the Comprehensive QFD, the advanced model of
QFD developed by Dr. Yoji Akao, founder of QFD.
Here is a part of the case study.
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QFD for Designing a New Brake System |
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The company in this example is a specialist in disc brake
applications for various mobile and stationary equipment,
including recreational, construction, agricultural and military
vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles. It has over 300 OEM customers. In
1999, the company obtained ISO 9001 certification.
This commitment to quality led to an initiative to apply
Comprehensive QFD for their future products. The aim was to
capture the "voice of the customer" and to build that into the new
design and development process.
Comprehensive QFD is a complex but very powerful product and
process development method. It addresses not only the design and
quality of the new product being developed, but also the company's
product development process as well as business operation,
bringing about a competitive focus to all activities in the
company - as the project team in this example marveled, "Little
did we appreciate at the start that Comprehensive QFD would allow
us to evaluate the functional, performance, reliability, and cost
parameters of our products."
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Project Goals and Key Customers |
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The company began by training their sales engineers, R&D
engineers, and quality engineers from all product sectors in the
QFD Green Belt® Course. Some of these members were subsequently
trained in QFD Black Belt® Course.
The project goals were elucidated by the QFD team members in
conjunction with management, and were organized using the standard
Management and Planning tools in QFD and Analyt ic Hierarchy
Process (AHP). The goals included:
- xoxoxoxoxo
- xyxyxyxyxy
- Develop new products for new customers.
- Create a superior new product development process that the
rest of the company could emulate.
It is important to capture the "voice of customers" that
can directly and indirectly lead to project success. As a
component supplier, the QFD forced the team to look not only at
the OEM engineers, but also at the end consumer who uses the
company's installed brake system and the dealer mechanic who must
maintain the performance of the brake system.
Using the Relations Diagram of the Management and Planning Tools
and the AHP, the team identified the purchasing decision process
and key end users.
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Voice of Customer and House of Quality |
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QFD offers a series of tools useful for extensive voice of
customer analysis. Using these tools, the team converted the
customer verbatim in the context of actual or possible scenarios
of use into additional unspoken data.
This analysis helped the team expand their understanding of
customer needs beyond the obvious into areas where hidden needs
may emerge in the future. For example, the team discovered that
the spoken concern about a 'soft lever' may indicate other
concerns such as shorter stops, quicker stops, etc. Going beyond
the stated needs has proven to be useful for development of new
products.
The voice of the customer was then translated into the voice of
the engineer and measurable design elements, using the House of
Quality matrix.
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Reliability Deployment |
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It is not uncommon for the QFD team to prioritize reliability and
safety studies based on the threat they pose to customer
satisfaction.
Failure modes extracted from field complaints and other sources
were constructed into a hierarchy. This was then juxtaposed into
other QFD matrices such as demanded quality table, functions
table, etc., to show failure to satisfy, failure to perform, and
so forth. High priority failures were then identified as
candidates for reliability engineering studies.
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Technology Deployment, New Concept Selection, and Part Deployment |
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Identifying technology gaps can be done by identifying the
company's core technologies and examining whether they were
sufficient or not to meet the performance, function and
reliability requirements established in the project.
Based on the technology gap identified, new design concepts
were proposed and prioritized for selection. An analysis was
conducted of the required parts for the selected concepts, by
identifying required functions at the component level and then
calculating part priorities using the relationship matrix of
quality characteristics and establishing a part/function
relationship.
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VA/VE for Cost Reduction |
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VA (Value
Analysis) was developed by Larry Miles of General Electric during
World War II to lower the cost of manufactured products. Miles'
approach was to examine the function of the product, so that
designers could develop alternative solutions to perform the same
functions at a lower cost. Value mismatches are identified where
the criticality of the function and the cost of the parts that
perform that function are examined. Where cost exceeds the value
of the function, cheaper alternative to those parts are sought.
Cost is always an important factor in product development. Part
cost is generally left out in the House of Quality and other
matrices, due to its ability to skew and overshadow the importance
of other characteristics. VA and VE allowed the team to look at
cost from an end users' perspective or from an engineering point
of view. This helped identify potential part reductions and
possibly combine part functions to keep cost in line with
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Results |
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QFD helped the company determine the importance of various
functions of a new braking system, its performance levels to
users, and subsequently to design two separate systems for a
customer proposal: a lower-cost alternative system and a high
performance model based on the QFD study.
The team believed that the extent they took in identifying the
customer's needs and by quantifying any additional cost as added
value, the QFD system would win out. They also reported, "It (QFD)
gave us a tremendous increase in our knowledge-base of the
competition, the end users perception of our place in the market,
and a model to follow into the future so that we can be leaders in
our industry." |
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This study was presented at the 12th Symposium on QFD (2002) by Jim
Dimsey, Hayes Brake, LLC and Glenn Mazur, Japan Business
Consultants, Ltd. Copyright © 2002- 2008 QFD Institute.
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