Page 139 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

114 Chapter Six

Project Goals
• Reduce prospecting cycle time from 16 to 5 business days.
• Reduce discovery cycle time from 34 to 10 business days.
• Reduce the close-the-deal cycle time from 81 to 45 business days
(all sales metrics net of customer-wait time).
• Reduce setup cycle time from 51 to 12 business days.
• Increase the percentage of service requests closed by the commitment
date from 54 percent (1.6σ) to 99.97 percent (5.0σ).

The following are the QFD steps.

Step 1: Identify the Whats and Hows and their Relationship
The DFSS team identifies customers and establishes customer wants,
needs, delights, and usage profiles. Corporate, regulatory, and social
requirements should be identified also. The value of this step is to greatly
improve the understanding and appreciation DFSS team members have
for customer, corporate, regulatory, and social requirements. The DFSS
team, at this stage, should be expanded to include market research. A
market research professional might help the Black Belt assume
leadership during startup activities and perhaps later remain an active
participant as the team gains knowledge about customer engagement
methods. The Black Belt should put plans in place to collaborate with
identified organizations and/or employee relations to define tasks and
plans in support of the project and to train team members in customer
processes, and forward-thinking methods such as brainstorming,
visioning, and conceptualizing.

The DFSS team should focus on the key customers to optimize decisions
around them and try to include as many additional customers as possible.
The team should establish customer environmental conditions and customer
usage and operating conditions, study customer demographics and profiles,
conduct customer performance evaluations, and understand the per-
formance of the competition. In addition, the team should
• Establish a rough definition of an ideal service
• Listen to the customer and capture wants and needs through interviews,
focus groups, customer councils, field trials, field observations,
surveys, etc.
• Analyze customer complaints and assign satisfaction performance
ratings to attributes
• Acquire and rank these ratings with the QFD process