Page 92 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

Product Development Process and Design for Six Sigma 67

Information mining of the voice of customers. According to Fig. 3.4, the
product development is a sequence of mapping processes. The very
first step is the mapping from the customer domain to the function
domain; this step is really a rigorous product definition step. The whole
value of the product is largely determined by whether the product will
be welcomed by the potential external customers, or buyers. If our
product is not wanted by customers, it will be a failure. So the ability
to accurately mine potential customers’ minds is critically important
in the product development process. There is a saying, Garbage in,
garbage out; if we totally ignore what customers want, or we did not do
a superb job in discovering what customers really want, our very first
input to the product development process might be totally flawed, and
whatever we do in the subsequent steps, we will produce a garbage
product. It is not an exaggeration that accurately capturing the voice
of the customer is like striking gold. There are numerous examples
about the importance of the mining of the voice of the customer and
success stories, such as Federal Express, Starbucks, and iPod.

Information mining of the technology information and knowledge. In the prod-
uct development process, we need to obtain the technological know-
how and information to make the voice of the customer into reality. In
this information mining work, the quality and speed of the information
mining are very important.
The quality of this information mining means that we are getting
the best technology in terms of performance, the cost of technology, and
the robustness of the technology. The performance of the technology
means that this technology can create the right functions and it per-
forms better than other competing technologies. The cost of technology
means that its cost-to-value ratio is high; we should not adopt the tech-
nology that has top-notch performance but is prohibitively expensive.
The robustness of the technology is also very important; the robust-
ness means that this technology can deliver its functions consistently
under various usage conditions and does not require excessive operator/
user requirements. Many very new technologies have excellent perfor-
mance, but their technical bugs have not been fully worked out yet;
introducing too many immature technologies into the product could
create potential quality and reliability problems.
The speed of this information mining is also critically important; the
ideal technology information mining process is featured by the abili-
ties to pull the right technology information to the right people in high
speed. In many companies, this information mining work is featured
by a slow and ineffective process, a lot of unnecessary information, and
a lot of reinvention.