Page 146 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

Quality Function Deployment 121

from further deployment if they do not relate to basic quality or performance
attributes in the Kano model. The theme of DFSS is to be customer driven
and to work on the right items; otherwise, we are creating a design “hidden
factory.”

In our example, the CTS requirement “Adequate follow-up” is weak (rated
13 on the importance rating). However, the What “Easy to use products” has
no strong relationship with any CTS requirements and eliminating
“Adequate follow-up” may weaken the delivery of this What even further.

Conflicts
The DFSS team needs to look for cases where technical benchmarking rates
their product or service high but the customer assessment is low. Miscon-
ceptions of customer attributes is the major root cause of these cases. The
team together with marketing can remedy these situations.

In our example, “Cost-effective products,” a What, is addressed by many CTS
requirements including “Save money and enhance productivity.” The customer
rates our product as weak (rating 2), while the technical assessment is rated the
highest (rating 4). Who is right? Conflicts may be a result of a failure to
understand the customer and must be resolved prior to further progress.

Strengths
By identifying the CTS requirements that contain the most 9 ratings, the DFSS
team pinpoints which CTS requirements have a significant impact on the total
design. Changes in these characteristics will greatly affect the design, and such
effects propagate via the correlation matrix to other CTS requirements causing
positive and negative implications. The following CTS requirements are sig-
nificant as implied by their importance ratings and number of 9 ratings in their
relationships to Whats: “Meet the expectations,” “Know my business and
offers,” “Save money and enhance Productivity,” “Do it right the first time,”
and “Know our products and processes.” Examining the correlation matrix
(Fig. 6.9), we have positive correlation all over except in the cell “Do it right
the first time” and “Meet time expectations.”

Eye-Openers
The DFSS team should look at customer attributes where
1. Their design as well as their competitors are performing poorly
2. The Whats are performing poorly compared to their competitors for
benchmarking
3. CTS requirements need further development in phase 2