Page 38 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

16 Chapter One

requirements. The voice of the customer is captured in a variety of ways,
including direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, cus-
tomer specifications, observation, warranty data, and field reports. This
understanding of the customer needs is then summarized in a product
planning matrix or “house of quality.” These matrices are used to trans-
late higher-level “whats” or needs into lower-level “hows”—product
requirements or technical characteristics to satisfy these needs.
Quality function deployment matrices are also a good communica-
tion tool at each stage in the product development cycle. QFD enables
people from various functional departments, such as marketing,
design engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing engineering,
test engineering, finance, and product support, to communicate and
work together effectively.
QFD was developed in the 1960s by Professors Shigeru Mizuno and
Yoji Akao. Their purpose was to develop a quality assurance method
that would design customer satisfaction into a product before it was
manufactured. Prior quality control methods were aimed primarily at
fixing a problem during or after manufacturing.

1.3.9 TRIZ (1950s in Soviet Union, 1990s in
the West)
TRIZ is another tool for design improvement by systematic methods
to foster creative design practices. TRIZ is a Russian acronym for the
theory of inventive problem solving (TIPS).
TRIZ is based on inventive principles derived from the study of more
than 1.5 million of the world’s most innovative patents and inventions.
TRIZ provides a revolutionary new way of systematically solving prob-
lems on the basis of science and technology. TRIZ helps organizations
use the knowledge embodied in the world’s inventions to quickly, effi-
ciently, and creatively develop “elegant” solutions to their most diffi-
cult product and engineering problems.
TRIZ was developed by Genrich S. Altshuller, born in the former
Soviet Union in 1926 and serving in the Soviet Navy as a patent expert
in the 1940s. Altshuller screened over 200,000 patents looking for
inventive problems and how they were solved. Altshuller distilled the
problems, contradictions, and solutions in these patents into a theory
of inventive problem solving which he named TRIZ.

1.3.10 Axiomatic design (1990)
Axiomatic design is a principle-based method that provides the designer
with a structured approach to design tasks. In the axiomatic design
approach, the design is modeled as mapping between different
domains. For example, in the concept design stage, it could be a map-
ping of the customer attribute domain to the product function domain;