Page 91 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

66 Chapter Three

customers are free of after-sale problems, our product development job
is done. Clearly, the nature of the product development process is an
information generation factory.
In Yang’s recent book (Yang 2008) Voice of the Customer Capture and
Analysis, he further described that there are three types of informa-
tion generation in the product development process: information min-
ing, information transformation, and information and knowledge
creation.

Information mining. Information mining is the extraction of valuable
information from the raw information sources. For example, in
research and publication work, the literature survey is an information
mining work. The raw information sources include professional jour-
nals, Internet, professional conferences, and leading professionals. The
process of literature survey is to extract the relevant and high-quality
information, then process and compile it. So this literature survey
report is the extracted, condensed information; similar to metal as
compared to ore, the literature survey report will serve as a stepping
stone for further research.
In the product development process, there are two major types of
information mining work: the mining of the voice of customer and the
mining of the technological information, as illustrated in Fig. 3.6.

Internal Customers

Y=f(x)
External
Customers CAs FRs DPs PVs
• • • •
• • • •
• • Y=f(x) • •
Physical mapping Process mapping

Customer Functional Physical Process
domain domain domain domain

Technical Information Sources

Mining of technology information

Mining of voice of customer
Figure 3.6 Information mining in the product development process.