The most important outcome of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a design and implementation activity list to assure customer satisfaction. Since most organizations cannot complete this list due to human resource, budget, and time constraints, some prioritization of the action items is necessary. Similarly, an important outcome of strategic planning is an activity list to assure fulfillment of business initiatives amid the same constraints. Prioritizing action items is critical to aiming the organization towards a shared vision.

One widely accepted approach to planning, priority setting, and resource allocation in complex situations involving multiple criteria is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, the oldest and most respected health insurance organization in the State of Florida, has incorporated both QFD and AHP for concept innovation and strategic decision making, showing supporting examples. This presentation will discuss their experience in using AHP and QFD, the benefits of using AHP as a prioritization methodology, the different approaches of AHP, and the best approach for different types of groups.

This presentation will be made by Carey Hepler, QFD Black Belt®, Innovation Director, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida.
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With continuous globalization, advancements in IT, and the awakening of the huge consumer market, it might not take too long for the monopoly practice of the state-controlled Chinese telecommunication industry to be chipped away until competition becomes unprecedented. While it is certain the telecom industry will become increasingly important to the nation's economic growth, already with 0.7 billion customers as of June 2005, the rapid expansion is also accelerating problem incidents related to service quality and rights protection.

What kind of network quality do Chinese customers require and where to go for the services that can completely satisfy them? Slogan campaigns advocating 'service must come first' or 'high quality focus' and launching ISO-9000 quality certification initiatives are not adequate enough to confront a challenge of this magnitude; it requires a comprehensive quality system like QFD.

This presentation will report a QFD-based Telecom Service Quality Improvement Model (TSQIM), specifically targeted to improve the service quality and customer satisfaction of the Chinese telecommunication industry. TSQIM analyzes service requirements of telecom customers and translates these requirements into telecom quality characteristics through use of HOQ (House of Quality). A series of HOQs can be then used to design a network quality optimization program, for further improvement. The model has been tested on the PHS network business of Lishui Telecom Company. The presentation will introduce the concept, methods, and the pilot application.

Governmental and non-governmental (NGO) organizations share many of the same challenges as for-profit corporations. Instead of the profit incentive, their goal is to deliver the best to their customers (clients) that their budget will allow. Innovation, of course, is often a key opportunity to get more bang for the buck. With a few changes, QFD can bring the power of Voice of the Customer (VOC) to helping these projects develop faster, better, and cheaper solutions.

This presentation will show that an adaptation of QFD's Voice of the Customer (VOC) tools can effectively address the many conflicts that any public project faces when trying to satisfy a broad range of economic, political, social, and functional needs of their constituents, including the challenges of sustainability and environmental guidelines such as Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS). The technique involves using Modern QFD's VOC tools to collect and analyze the Voice of the Constituents, weight them to the goals of the project and community, gather the constituents' divergent opinions and translate these into "needs," and prioritize the needs according to the weight of each constituent's group. The result would be a set of needs that reflects the cross-tabulated priorities of the larger population.

Additional QFD tools could be used to convert the needs into engineering or service characteristics, which could then be used to generate additional concepts, ultimately leading to selection of the best option. At the Symposium, the authors will present examples from real road construction projects how this model can be used in civil engineering and other public projects.

With the 10-year anniversary of the sovereignty handover just days ago, the former British colony of Hong Kong faces changes on many fronts, including increasing business competition not just from overseas but also from other cities in its new country China. Nowhere this is felt more keenly than in Hong Kong's manufacturing industry, in particular textile and clothing.

This presentation will show how a QFD framework can be applied to vocational curriculum planning, so that vocational education institutions in Hong Kong and elsewhere can better prepare themselves and their students for meeting the increasingly customer-oriented marketplace and changing knowledge needs of manpower groups in manufacturing industries. Making use of the basic principles of QFD, the framework provides the logic for incorporating the voices of the major customer groups into the curriculum planning process. The application method is illustrated through a study on the content planning of an in-house staff development program that teaches clothing merchandisers the necessary technical knowledge in performing fabric sourcing tasks. Winner of 2007 Akao Scholarship for QFD.

QFD research began around 1966 in Japan by Drs. Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno. The younger generations of Japanese scholars have kept the masters' torch burning into the present day by continuously advancing research for the Japanese industry that has benefited so greatly from the efforts of post WW-II growth.

Reflecting back on the history of the nation's QFD research, the authors present Japan's third generation QFD framework called e7-QFD (evolution 7 - QFD). It is a part of the on-going research by the QFD committee members at the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers to better address the challenges faced by today's Japanese businesses and quality leaders. The initial concept was presented at the 11th and 12th International Symposium on QFD.

The new e7-QFD framework includes Bos-QFD (Blue Ocean Strategy QFD, a concept of competing without falling into the price competition of a commodity market), Concept Mining, Stat-QFD (Statistical QFD), QA-QFD (Quality Assurance-QFD), Job-QFD (Job/Business Function-QFD), TT-QFD (Taguchi Method and TRIZ-QFD), Rdb-QFD (real time database QFD), and Sus-QFD (sustainable growth-QFD). The concept, method, and relationship of each of these seven techniques will be explained at the Symposium, as well as their systematization.