"Route of the Quality Model: Translating the Voice of the Customer in Process Improvement" [Brazil]

Oi Telecommunication Company (Telemar Norte Leste Group) is the largest telecom company in Brazil. 100% state controlled, the company is the nation's pioneer in integrated telecommunication services to over 28 million customers, including 14.4 million fixed lines, 12.6 million mobile phone services, and 1 million broadband services. The current Oi is the result of the 1998 privatization drive in Brazilian telecom industry as well as the recent merger of an original Oi mobile service provider and Telemar. These changes necessitated a great deal of balancing act in corporate strategy and goals as well as overhaul in their practice in quality, customer satisfaction, and regulatory compliance.

This paper presents a QFD-based evolutionary Quality Route Model at Oi Telecommunication Company that evolved from this process over the last few years. The Quality Route Model not only translates the Voice of the Customer into relevant indicators of main operational processes to be monitored, but it also provides a managerial process that enables matching the execution of processes to its mandatory requirements, client satisfaction, and strategic goals relevant to the company.

The presentation at the Symposium will introduce the methodology, the Model's step by step application, and the main results achieved. Among its many benefits include verification of indicators' adherence to the client's needs, strategic objectives, and regulatory requirements, in addition to establishment of goals that portray the company's reality and its objectives.

"Fusion of QFD and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)" [Japan]
When designing a product, an engineer must take into consideration requirements of all relevant departments that are not always easy to understand, as well as tremendous volume of information that come in varieties of forms from personal communication with other engineers to a thick pile of documents in a file cabinet that may be in need of updating.

Once all required information is verified and organized, the designer manually inputs the information into design tools such as 3D-CAD. Not only is this process prone to errors, there is a risk that the designer becomes the sole owner of what and how data gets used. Any mistake or oversight during this process could lead to a failed prototype and production trial, negatively affecting the project schedule. To make matters worse, the designer becomes overworked as he/she tries to find a solution, falling into a downward spiral of developing more quality problems.

While many manufactures in Japan use QFD, they often do not have a system to easily search, extract and analyze the required information from spreadsheet software. When the QFD results which took a long process and many resources cannot be readily available for a new product's development, companies become frustrated and less compelled to try QFD on their next project.

The author proposes the use of Product Data Management (PDM) system to solve this problem. PDM can manage data history, status, and change processes as well as search function, security and access permission, the tasks that many Japanese engineers currently do manually. By building a PDM template on a 3D-CAD system, parameter information can be interlocked with QFD deployment matrices, allowing automatic data update seamless across design tools and quick simulation of feasibility studies for design review. This paper introduces how to integrate QFD and PLM by using PDM to manage QFD data.

This presentation will be made by Tadao Nakamura, Technical Manager, Dassault Systemes K.K., Japan.

"Multiple Progression QFD(TM): A Case Study of Cooking Product Functionality at Arla Foods" [Sweden]
The largest dairy company in Europe, Arla Foods is co-operatively owned by ten thousand dairy farmers, delivering about 80% of total milk production for Sweden and Denmark combined. The objective of this project was to advance knowledge of how the production process and ingredients could influence the cooking functionality of a certain dairy product and how to measure such product properties, so that this knowledge could be used in subsequent product developments and improvements.

QFD methodology was used to guide and structure the information-gathering processes and to link individual sub-project information firmly together. By using a lean QFD project management approach, the authors developed a new system, "Multiple Progression QFD(TM)," for process industry applications where unique needs often include complex manufacturing processes involving multiple production steps and long internal and external production chains.

The new method was tested for the first time on a large product development project at Arla Foods. This presentation will report the process as well as industrial feasibility of the new system that could be used in other process industry projects.

This case study will be presented by Thomas Lager, B&L Innovation AB (blinab) and Åsa Kjell, Project Manager Innovation, Arla Foods, Sweden.

"IT Service Deployment" [Germany]
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are emerging as a common practice in the IT business where a provider of corporate network services promises a certain percentage of the network availability and service level for a specific price. SLA reports delivered by the service providers are not easy to comprehend and are often meaningless to end users because they are structured by IT components and not by the business process of the customer. IT management is typically focused on technical aspects and they employ SLAs to justify their performance ('we can prove we did our best!'), while frustrated customers think 'IT only sticks to the rules, they do not care about our needs!' Hence, a gap between the Voice of the Customer and the Voice of the Engineer.

If IT is reduced to a fundamental technical commodity like a power supply, its business value will degrade ('IT doesn't matter'). In order to survive the outsourcing battle, full potential IT service must shift their focus to the business requirements and needs of their customers. This paper shows how a QFD framework can be utilized in the IT business in order to develop customer-focused products and services encompassing customer requirements, performance criteria, and functions to process improvements. The presentation at the Symposium will show two case studies where this framework was applied and validated.