Page 147 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

122 Chapter Six

We can pencil in “Flexible processes” in the first category and “Accuracy”
and “Easy-to-use products” in the second category. The CTS requirements
that deliver these Whats should receive the greatest attention as they
represent potential payoffs. Benchmarking areas represent the Whats where
competitors are highly rated and it is highly desirable to incorporate their
designs. This saves design and research time.
The highest CTS requirements with the largest importance ratings are the
most important. For example, “Know our products and processes” has the
highest rating at 133. This rating is so high because it has three strong rela-
tionships to the Whats. The degree of difficulty is medium (rating 3) in the
technical benchmarking. In addition any CTS requirement that has a
negative or strong relationship with this CTS requirement in the correlation
matrix should be addressed in phase 2.

6.8 QFD Case Study: Yaesu Book Center

This case study is from Akao (1990). The Yaesu Book Center is a bookstore
in Japan. When it first opened, the store had few employees experienced in
bookselling. Most of the business was conducted by employees who had
recently graduated from school. In spite of that, the Yaesu Book Center
attracted a great deal of attention and was highly regarded by book lovers.

The Yaesu Book Center has its own quality control (QC) circle. In the QC
circle, the area managers are also group leaders. The QC circle determined
that the following three things are essential to satisfy customers’ needs:
1. Have enough books available
2. Have enough product information
3. Provide enough service
The QC circle members also found that they did not have enough
information to figure out how to accomplish the preceding three objectives
due to the following:
1. Specific customer demands were not clear.
2. There were no specific quantitative measurements for customer
demands.
3. The relationship between the customers’demands and the Yaesu Book
Center’s service product was not clear.
To solve these problems, the voices of customers were collected and a two-
phase QFD was conducted by the Yaesu Book Center to improve the
bookstore operation. This QFD study was conducted by the following steps: