Dr. Akao is also on this corporate governance committee and has suggested that QFD-based Knowledge Management, a topic he has focused on for the past ten years, may be a useful way to make explicit, the intrinsic knowledge of well-performing boards.

The QFD Gold Belt^® program for executives has been applying some of this thinking in recent years, too. This program is used in companies to understand the implicit strengths and weaknesses of their product development process in order to tailor explicit improvements to both their process and the resulting products.

This creates a customized QFD tool set and sequence for the organization which provides the benefit of more efficient implementation, better support and buy-in by executives and managers, and easier spread within the organization to other divisions, project groups, and even subsequent generations of the same product (cradle-to-cradle).

This leads to QFD sustainability, which improves the cost/benefit ratio of the QFD investment in technical resources. This sustainable QFD effort has proven valuable to executives in others ways:

As the 21st century moves into its second decade, major shifts are taking place in the global economy. These are based on inevitable changes in geographics, demographics, psychographics, and other factors. The quality movement is in a unique position to both guide and insist on fact-based decision making, forecasting consequences of decisions with cause-and-effect thinking, and documenting best communication and management practices.

Dr. Akao and Glenn Mazur will address some of these trends in their keynote presentations at the 16th International Symposium on QFD to be held in Portland Oregon on September 24-25, 2010.

Programs are available for project team members who want either public courses or in-company training. The QFD Green Belt® program is the modern QFD tools course. It is based on Blitz QFD®, the no-matrix approach to identifying key customer needs and assuring a quality focus on solutions. The Blitz QFD® program was developed with busy product development teams in mind.

Many project teams abandon QFD attempts in the middle or complete it after the product is launched because the House of Quality matrix (HOQ) and other matrices consume more time than is available. The Blitz QFD® concept is "don't analyze what you can't deploy."

This means that if your human resources, budget, and schedule are constrained (that's all of us!), it will be impossible to deliver superior performance on everything. So, let's focus on the few things that customers need most, the things that will set our product apart in the mind of the customer.

This requires very careful examination of what benefits the customer values most, so in Blitz QFD® there is a very strong set of customer needs analysis tools that go beyond the obvious, spoken requirements to the unspoken needs. This can lead to a truly differentiated product. MS Excel templates for these new tools are included with the training.

The QFD Black Belt® program builds on the QFD Green Belt® with advanced tools, more in-depth skills on the basic Blitz QFD® tools, and facilitation secrets to more effective QFD implementation. This program also includes upgrades to the Traditional QFD tools such as the House of Quality, so you know when to do them, how to do them right, and ways to do them efficiently.

Optionally, the train-the-trainer program is available to full QFD Black Belts® so they can train their own QFD Green Belts® in their tailored QFD process. Companies pursuing this path report repeated successes not only with their products, but in upgrading their human resource skills. MS Excel templates for these new tools are included with the training.