DESCRIPCIÓN DEL BANCO DE ENSAYOS

Project ideas may be generated from (a) Voice of Customer, (b) Voice of Business and (c) Cost of Poor Quality.

The common sources of such Project ideas are

Table 12

Customer Dashboards Surveys and Scorecards

Internal/External Audits Financial Analysis of Business Units/ Center

Benchmarking Data Focus Groups

VOC, VOB and COPQ data help us develop project themes which can help us understand the Big Y (output) Some common Project themes are

Table 13

Product returns or High Warranty Cost Customer Complaints Accounts receivables or Invoicing issues Cycle time, Lead time

Defective Services or Products Yield Improvement, Re-work or Scrap Reduction

Capacity Constraints, Inventory Resource Utilisation

Post the team that has the pertinent VOC, VOB and COPQ data, they then need to translate this information into Critical Customer Requirements (CCR's). A CCR is a specific characteristic of the product or service desired by and important to the customer. The CCR should be measurable with a target and an allowable range. The team would take all the data, identify the key common customer issues, and then define the associated CCR's.

The Critical Customer Requirements (CCR's) often are at too high a level to be directly useful to the team. So the next step is to take the applicable CCR's and translate them into Critical to Quality (CTQ) measures. A CTQ is a measure on the output of the process. It is a measure that is important to meeting the defined CCR's.

Table 14

Big Y Reduce Operational Expenditure

Voice of Business Collection of accounts receivable is taking too long CCR Accounts Receivable to be closed within 60 days

CTQ Time to receive payments

Of course there are multiple alternative methods to drill down to an appropriate CTQ. Project team may also choose to drill down to the Project CTQ from the Big Y.

Kano Model Analysis

The Kano Model of Customer (Consumer) Satisfaction classifies product attributes based on how they are perceived by customers and their effect on customer satisfaction. These classifications are useful for guiding design decisions.

Project activities in which the Kano Model is useful o Identifying customer needs

o Determining functional requirements

o Concept development

o Analyzing competitive products

Other tools those are useful in conjunction with the Kano Model o Eliciting Customer Input

o Prioritization Matrices o Quality Function Deployment

Introduction

The Kano Model of Customer satisfaction (Figure 19) divides product attributes into three categories:

threshold, performance, and excitement. A competitive product meets basic attributes, maximizes performances attributes, and includes as many “excitement” attributes as possible at a cost the market can bear.

Figure 19: Kano Model

 Threshold Attributes

Threshold (or basic) attributes are the expected attributes or “musts” of a product, and do not provide an opportunity for product differentiation. Increasing the performance of these attributes provides diminishing returns in terms of customer satisfaction, however the absence or poor performance of these attributes results in extreme customer dissatisfaction. An example of a threshold attribute would be brakes on a car.

Threshold attributes are not typically captured in QFDs (Quality Function Deployment) or other evaluation tools as products are not rated on the degree to which a threshold attribute is met, the attribute is either satisfied or not.

Attributes that must be present in order for the product to be successful, can be viewed as a 'price of entry.' However, the customer will remain neutral toward the product even with improved execution of these aspects.

o Nurses will be able to take a patient's temperature o Mechanic will be able to change a tire

o Keyboards will have a space bar

Customers rarely mention this category, unless they have had a recent negative experience, because it is assumed to be in place.

 Performance Attributes

Performance attributes are those for which more is generally better, and will improve customer satisfaction.

Conversely, an absent or weak performance attribute reduces customer satisfaction. Of the needs customers verbalize, most will fall into the category of performance attributes. These attributes will form the weighted needs against which product concepts will be evaluated.

The price for which customer is willing to pay for a product is closely tied to performance attributes. For example, customers would be willing to pay more for a car that provides them with better fuel economy.

 Excitement Attributes

Excitement attributes are unspoken and unexpected by customers but can result in high levels of customer satisfaction, however their absence does not lead to dissatisfaction. Excitement attributes often satisfy latent needs – real needs of which customers are currently unaware. In a competitive marketplace where manufacturers’ products provide similar performance, providing excitement attributes that address

“unknown needs” can provide a competitive advantage. Although they have followed the typical evolution to a performance then a threshold attribute, cup holders were initially excitement attributes.

Increased functionality or quality of execution will result in increased customer satisfaction. Conversely, decreased functionality results in greater dissatisfaction. Product price is often related to these attributes.

Examples are:

o The shortest waiting time possible in the bank drive-up window

o The shortest waiting time possible for the nurse to answer the patient call button

o The auto mechanic performing the services on the car as efficiently and inexpensively as possible

o Tech support being able to help with a problem as quickly and thoroughly as possible Customers give the most information on this category.

 Other Attributes

Products often have attributes that cannot be classified according to the Kano Model. These attributes are often of little or no consequence to the customer, and do not factor into consumer decisions. An example of this type of attribute is a plate listing part numbers can be found under the hood on many vehicles for use by repairpersons.

Customers get great satisfaction from a feature - and are willing to pay a price premium. However, satisfaction will not decrease (below neutral) if the product lacks the feature. These features are often

unexpected by customers and they can be difficult to establish as needs up front. Sometimes called unknown or latent needs.

o The drive-up bank teller greets you by name; remembers you from a previous visit o The nurse brings you a book that you mentioned you enjoy

o The mechanic cleans and vacuums the car making it better than when you brought it in o The tech support individual emails you a $5 coupon to compensate for the issue

Customers rarely provide VOC on this category because they don't know to expect it. Innovation is needed to provide this level of quality consistently.

Application of the Kano Model Analysis

 A relatively simple approach to applying the Kano Model Analysis is to ask customers two simple questions for each attribute:

o Rate your satisfaction if the product has this attribute?; and o Rate your satisfaction if the product did not have this attribute?

Customers should be asked to answer with one of the following responses:

A. Satisfied

B. Neutral (Its normally that way) C. Dissatisfied

D. Don’t care

 Basic attributes generally receive the “Neutral” response to Question 1 and the “Dissatisfied”

response to Question 2. Exclusion of these attributes in the product has the potential to severely impact the success of the product in the marketplace.

 Eliminate or include performance or excitement attributes that their presence or absence respectively lead to customer dissatisfaction. This often requires a trade-off analysis against cost. As Customers frequently rate most attributes or functionality as important, asking the question “How much extra would you be willing to pay for this attribute or more of this attribute?” will aid in trade-off decisions, especially for performance attributes. Prioritization matrices can be useful in determining which excitement attributes would provide the greatest returns on Customer satisfaction.

 Consideration should be given to attributes receiving a “Don’t care” response as they will not increase customer satisfaction nor motivate the customer to pay an increased price for the product. However, do not immediately dismiss these attributes if they play a critical role to the product functionality or are necessary for other reasons than to satisfy the customer.

The information obtained from the Kano Model Analysis, specifically regarding performance and excitement attributes, provides valuable input for the Quality Function Deployment process.

Quality Function Deployment

In a few words: The voice of the customer translated into the voice of the engineer

To design a product well, a design teams needs to know what it is they are designing, and what the end-users will expect from it. Quality Function Deployment is a systematic approach to design based on a close awareness of customer desires, coupled with the integration of corporate functional groups. It consists in translating customer desires (for example, the ease of writing for a pen) into design characteristics (pen ink viscosity, pressure on ball-point) for each stage of the product development (Rosenthal, 1992).

Quality function deployment (QFD) is “a system to assure that customer needs drive the product design and production process”. Ultimately the goal of QFD is to translate often subjective quality criteria into objective ones that can be quantified and measured and which can then be used to design and manufacture the product. It is a complimentary method for determining how and where priorities are to be assigned in product development. The intent is to employ objective procedures in increasing detail throughout the development of the product.

Quality Function Deployment was developed by Yoji Akao in Japan in 1966. By 1972 the power of the approach had been well demonstrated at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Kobe Shipyard (Sullivan, 1986) and in 1978 the first book on the subject was published in Japanese and then later translated into English in 1994 (Mizuno and Akao, 1994).

In Akao’s words, QFD "is a method for developing a design quality aimed at satisfying the consumer and then translating the consumer's demand into design targets and major quality assurance points to be used throughout the production phase. ... [QFD] is a way to assure the design quality while the product is still in the design stage." As a very important side benefit he points out that, when appropriately applied, QFD has demonstrated the reduction of development time by one-half to one-third. (Akao, 1990) QFD is a cross-functional planning tool which is used to ensure that the voice of the customer is deployed throughout the product planning and design stages. QFD is used to encourage breakthrough thinking of new concepts and technology. Its use facilitates the process of concurrent engineering and encourages teamwork to work towards a common goal of ensuring customer satisfaction.

The basic concept of QFD is to translate the requirements of the stakeholders into product design or engineering characteristics, and subsequently into process specifications and eventually into production requirements. It is a method that structures the translation of stakeholders’ requirements into technical specifications which are mainly understood by engineers.

Every translation involves a matrix. Through a series of interactive matrices, QFD can be employed to address almost any business situation requiring decisions involving a multitude of criteria, requirements or demands.

This stems from QFD inherently employing and orchestrating many of the Total Quality Management tools and processes in a rigorous and strategic fashion. When used in the evaluation phase of a project, QFD can assure that all relevant issues have been addressed and can provide a new basis for prioritizing projects.

The 3 main goals in implementing QFD are:

 Prioritize spoken and unspoken customer wants and needs.

 Translate these needs into technical characteristics and specifications.

 Build and deliver a quality product or service by focusing everybody toward customer satisfaction.

Since its introduction, Quality Function Deployment has helped to transform the way many companies:

 Plan new products

 Design product requirements

 Determine process characteristics

 Control the manufacturing process

 Document already existing product specifications Application of QFD in various fields:

 How a process/technique can become environmentally friendly, high quality products are still maintained and technologies are available to curb the process emissions. Such as environmental design, sustainable design, environmentally-conscious processes or products, clean technologies, and green products or systems.

 QFD can be effectively used are regulatory compliance, emission reduction, pollution and loss prevention programmes, construction or operating permit acquisition, and equipment procurement (equipment leaks).

The House of Quality

A house of quality (HOQ) involves the collection and analysis of the “voice of the customer” which includes the customer needs for a product, customers’ perceptions on the relative importance of these needs and the relative performance of the producing company and its main competitors on the needs. It also requires the generation and analysis of the “voice of the technician” which includes the technical measures converted from the customer needs, technicians’ evaluations on the relationship between each customer need and each technical measure, and the performance of the relevant companies in terms of these technical measures.

Figure 20: Quality Function Deployment Template

The HOQ Elements

A typical HOQ contains some of the following elements or concepts:

 “a”- Customer needs (WHATs)

This is the generally the first portion of the House of Quality (HOQ) matrix to be completed and also the most important. It documents a structured list of a product’s customers requirements described in their own words (the voice of the customer). These are the requirements of customers for the product expressed in customer’s language. The team then gathers information from customers on the requirements they have for the product or service. The information gathered through conversations with the customer to describe their needs and problems. In order to organize and evaluate this data, the team uses simple quality tools like Affinity diagrams and Tree diagrams. The completed Affinity Diagram can then be used as the basis of a Tree Diagram. This is constructed from the top down with each level being considered in turn for errors and omissions. The result is a family tree type hierarchy of customer needs. If there are many customer needs, grouping them into meaningful hierarchies or categories is necessary for easy understanding and analysis.

This structure is then documented in the customer requirement portion of the HOQ matrix.

 “b”- Planning Matrix

This matrix contains the correlation between each pair of customer needs (WHATs) through empirical comparisons. The information is provided by customers and usually is difficult to obtain since a lot of pair

wise comparisons are needed. The purpose of completing this correlation matrix is for the company to identify where trade-off decisions and further research may be required. Firstly it quantifies the customer’s requirement priorities and their perceptions of the performance of existing products. Secondly it allows these priorities to be adjusted based on the issues that concern the design team.

o Importance Weighting

The first and most important measure in this section is the requirement Importance Weighting. This figure quantifies the relative importance of each of the customer requirements (described in the left hand portion of the HOQ matrix) from the customer’s own perspective. This measure is often shown in a column alongside the customer requirement descriptions in the left section of the HOQ matrix.

A questionnaire is used to gather these importance weightings. In this a customer is asked to give importance for each documented requirement. On a scale from 1 - 5, customers then rate the importance of each requirement. A better but more involved approach is to use the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). This also utilizes a questionnaire but offers the customer pairings of requirement to consider. They choose the most important from this pair. These results are then interpreted into numerical weightings using a matrix.

The other measures which are determined by the design team can also be included in the planning matrix.

These can include:

o Planned satisfaction Rating

The planned Satisfaction Rating quantifies the design team’s desired performance of the envisaged product in satisfying each requirement.

o Improvement Factor

It can be then calculated by subtracting the performance score of the company’s existing product from its planned performance score i.e. the number of improvement points. This difference is multiplied by an improvement increment (e.g. 0.2) and this is added to 1 to give the improvement factor.

o Sales-point

A sales-point is a kind of possibility which will give your company a unique business position. This measure can be used to a weight to those requirements which can be utilized to market the product (Usually between 1 and 1.5). A “strong” sales point is reserved for important WHATs where each comparing company is rated poorly. A “moderate” sales point means the importance rating or competitive opportunity is not so great. And a “no” sales point means no business opportunity. Numerically, 1.5, 1.25 and 1 are assigned to strong, moderate and no sales point respectively. Additional measures (e.g. environmental impact, competitor’s future actions etc.) can also be included where these are deemed useful by the team.

o Overall Weighting

An Overall Weighting relating to each requirement can then be calculated by multiplying the importance Weights by the improvement Ratio and the Sales Point.

 “c”- Technical measures (HOWs) Voice of Company

This section of the House of Quality (HOQ) matrix is also referred to as engineering Characteristics or the Voice of the Company. It describes the product in the terms of the company. This information is generated by the QFD design team who identify all the measurable characteristics of the product which they perceive are related to meeting the specified customer requirements. These are design specifications, substitute quality characteristics, engineering attributes or methods, which can relate to and measure customer needs. The technical descriptors are attributes about the product or service that can be measured and benchmarked against the competition. Technical descriptors may exist that your organization is already using to determine product specification, however new measurements can be created to ensure that your product is meeting characteristics of the product. Its structure is that of a standard two dimensional matrix with cells that relate to combinations of individual customer and technical requirements. It is the task of the QFD team to identify where these interrelationships are significant. Each combination of customer and technical is considered in turn by the QFD team. E.g. How significant is Padding thickness is satisfying comfortable when hanging?

This matrix is a systematic means for identifying the level of relationship between each WHAT and each HOW.

The relationship matrix is where the team determines the relationship between customer needs and the company's ability to meet those needs. The team asks the question, "what is the strength of the relationship between the technical descriptors and the customers needs?" The level of interrelationship discerned is weighted usually on a four point scale (High, Medium, Low, None) and a symbol representing this level of interrelationship is entered into the matrix cell.

 “e”- Roof / Correlation Matrix

The triangular “roof” matrix of the House of Quality is used to identify where the technical requirements that characterize the product, support or impede one another. As in the interrelationship section, the QFD team work through the cells in this roof matrix considering the pairings of technical requirements these represent.

For each cell the question is asked: Does improving one requirement cause a deterioration or improvement in the other technical requirement? Where the answer is a deterioration, an engineering trade- off exists and a symbol is entered into the cell to represent this (usually a cross or “-“). Where improving one requirement leads to an improvement in the other requirement, an alternative symbol is entered into the cell (Usually a

For each cell the question is asked: Does improving one requirement cause a deterioration or improvement in the other technical requirement? Where the answer is a deterioration, an engineering trade- off exists and a symbol is entered into the cell to represent this (usually a cross or “-“). Where improving one requirement leads to an improvement in the other requirement, an alternative symbol is entered into the cell (Usually a

In document TESIS DOCTORAL (página 109-114)