Page 103 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

84 Chapter Five

or service together with those of competitors; Gale called this step of
compiling the market-perceived quality profile.
2. Collect information about the price of the company’s product or
service or combined customer costs, together with competitors’ prices
or combined customer costs. Gale calls this step of compiling the
market-perceived price profile.
3. Complete a comprehensive customer value evaluation of the
company’s product or service compared with competitors, Gale calls
this step of compiling the customer value map.
4. Complete an area-to-area competitive analysis, so the critical areas
can be identified in order to gain a competitive advantage.
5. Deploy the critical improvement into the product or service design.

In this chapter, we discuss this customer value management in detail.
Section 5.2 discusses all aspects of establishing a market-perceived quality
profile. Section 5.3 gives details about how to establish a market-perceived
price profile. Section 5.4 discusses the customer value map, Sec. 5.5
discusses area-to-area competitive analysis, and Sec. 5.6 covers the QFD-
like approach to improve product service design to maximize market-
perceived customer value.

5.2 Market-Perceived Quality Profile

In the customer value management approach, all non-cost-related attributes,
such as functional benefits, psychological benefits, and service and con-
venience benefits are considered to be components of market-perceived
quality. If a product or service can offer a higher market-perceived quality
than all competitors yet have its cost under control, then clearly this product
will have a competitive edge. The market-perceived quality profile is a
detailed quality scorecard that provides quantitative quality ratings of a
company’s own product versus competitors’ products on all important non-
cost-related attributes.

According to Gale (1994), creating the market-perceived quality profile
involves the following steps:

1. In forums such as focus groups, ask customers in the targeted market,
including both your customers and competitors’ customers, to list the
factors, other than price, that are important in their purchase decisions.
2. Establish how the various nonprice factors are weighted in the
customer’s decision, usually by simply asking customers to tell you how
they weigh the various factors, distributing 100 points among them.