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The
Quality Revolution
By
Glenn Mazur ,
Executive Director, QFD Institute and International Council for QFD.
The 2007 International Symposium on QFD
in Williamsburg, Virginia serves a special reminder for what we can
learn from history to build a better future. This year marks the
400th anniversary of nearby Jamestown, Williamsburg's predecessor
and the first permanent English settlement in America. This colony
began as a business venture to improve the lives of its citizens
through new trade routes, new sources of raw materials for nascent
industries, and new opportunities for economic advancement for those
with few other options.
The descendents of these early settlers
would grow wealthy in the next 150 years and begin demanding
political and economic rights equal to those of their fellow
citizens still in England. Now thirteen colonies spread over a
continent and a Babel of different ethnicities, economies, and
religions, they were able to come together in common cause to resist
and eventually revolt against British control.
This keynote address will discuss how
technological advancements led to improved product quality and
choice, and how this new found choice of goods inevitably led to a
demand for freedom of choice in all aspects of life. You will hear
the revolutionary path from industrial revolution to industrious
revolution to consumer revolution to lifestyle revolution to
political revolution. QFD is about the Voice of the Customer. Once
unleashed, this voice continues to demand more and more from the
marketplace and beyond. Those who supply goods, services, and ideas
will see that when the customer wins, we all win.
.............................................................................
 QFD and Knowledge Management: QFD Application on the Development of a Finger Vein Authentication
Device
By Akao Yoji, Ph.D., Yamagata
University, Japan (Kazuhiko Kitano, co-author, Hitachi Omron
Terminal
Solutions, Ltd., Japan)
Founder of QFD methodology, Dr. Yoji
Akao will present a case study on the development of a new
finger vein authentication device using the state-of-art
near-infrared light transmission technology by Hitachi Omron
Terminal Solutions, Ltd.
QFD and Knowledge Management were
applied to understand the customer needs of a medical application.
And then, this knowledge was used to develop a brand new product
for the financial and security industries, enabling the company to enter
the new markets successfully. The presentation will show the entire
flow of the QFD project, how knowledge management fits into the
process, as well as new technology deployment. The product was
released into the Japanese market just last year with great success.
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The Analytic Hierarchy Process: How
to Measure Intangibles in a Meaningful Way Side by Side with
Tangibles
By Thomas L. Saaty, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, USA
"Numbers come in different scales, each with different properties of
measurements. It is important for people today to recognize that,
especially QFD practitioners and Six Sigma Black/Master Black Belts,"
says Glenn Mazur,
executive director of the QFD Institute.
"We must learn to use the correct types of numbers with care, in order
to have a sound decision-making process, whether for drafting a
marketing plan, weighing multiple product attributes in a QFD project,
using customer questionnaire data for new product development, or
prioritizing the needs of various constituents."
One of the best decision- making
methods available today is called the Analytic
Hierarchy Process (AHP). Proven mathematically rigorous and
relatively easy to use, AHP has become an integral part of
Modern QFD. Among thousands of applications by companies
and government agencies, AHP was used by IBM as part of its quality
improvement strategy to design its AS/400 computer and win the Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Award.
On
September 7, 2007, Dr. Thomas Saaty, Ph.D., renowned
architect of AHP, will give a
special
talk at the
13th
International Symposium on QFD in Williamsburg, Virginia USA.
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Dr.
Saaty
will discuss the fundamentals of AHP through colorful application
examples ranging from estimating the cereal industry market share
and dominance of various drinks in the U.S. market to predicting
the outcome of a world chess championship match (Karpov-Korchnoi
match) and U.S. presidential elections (1980: Carter-Reagan; 1992
Perot-Bush-Clinton).
Here
is an excerpt from Dr. Saaty's keynote:
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"There are several fundamentally different concepts that are new,
several of which are dealt with in my talk. The first is that new
ways have been discovered for measuring the intensity of feelings
of human beings. People today believe that one cannot measure
them. This belief is a consequence of the idea that to measure
something is to apply some physical scale to it that has
gradations with some kind of numbers attached to them. Most people
including scientists believe that to measure something is to
assign a number to it independently of any other things that can
be measured on the same scale.
"The second is that by learning to measure intangibles alongside
tangibles in a credible and valid way, we have created the
opportunity to deal with the meaning of everything physical,
psychological, spiritual or abstract in some way that relates it
to our own values and objectives. The most significant thing we do
in understanding the world is to determine the kind of objectivity
we ascribe to it as observers.
"The third concept is that language alone is not adequate to
express one's feelings about the intensity of dominance or
importance of some aspect of a decision, much less is it adequate
to synthesize across all the various aspects involved in the
decision....
"The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is the original theory of
multi-criteria prioritization that derives relative scales of
absolute numbers known as priorities from judgments expressed
numerically on an absolute fundamental scale. It is also about a
more general approach to decisions that is a generalization of
hierarchies to networks with dependence and feedback, the Analytic
Network Process (ANP)....
"The AHP/ANP evolved out of my experience at the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in the Department of State during the
Kennedy and Johnson years of presidency. ACDA negotiated arms
agreements with the Soviets in Geneva. I was invited to join ACDA,
I think because of work I had done for the military using the
mathematics of Operations Research. I published on it and wrote
the first book on mathematical methods of operations research. At
ACDA I supervised a team of foremost internationally known
scientists, economists and game theorists (including four people
who later won the Nobel Prize in economics: Gerard Debreu, John
Harsanyi, Reinhardt Selten and more recently Robert Aumann) who
advised ACDA on arms tradeoffs. But we had some insurmountable
difficulties in making lucid and usable recommendations to our
highly intelligent and experienced negotiators who were guided by
strong intuition deriving from long practice. That was a time when
people did not believe that one could quantify feelings, but we
now know otherwise...."
Excerpt from "The Analytic Hierarchy Process: How to Measure
Intangibles in a Meaningful Way Side by Side with Tangibles,"
keynote by Thomas L. Saaty, Ph.D., the
13th Symposium on
QFD, September 7-8, 2007, Williamsburg, VA. © 2007 QFD
Institute, www.qfdi.org
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