All entries for February 2019

BUSINESS STARTS WITH CUSTOMER

This blog will be about the Quality Function Deployment tool that I mentioned in my last blog. It set the basis of the new product development. The tool focuses on the customer. It makes us think what the customer wants, what are the requirements of the customer. Once you know your customer, it sets the basis for the further engineering, manufacturing, sales and distribution decisions. This tool is linked with the design areas that need to be targeted in the product looking at the customer requirements. There are certain requirements that I feel are necessary to start implementing this tool. As a part of my critical thinking journey I have realized the importance of word, "Why?" Why such a tool is not used in the small scale manufacturing industries back home. First answer can be the lack of knowledge. But there are various other reasons apart from them. The managers back home never realize that they need to improve the process by which they can know the customer requirments. There is no mapping of the customer chain. The customer cahin might include the wholesaler, retailer , purchaser and the final customer. Mapping the right chain will help to identify the various customers involved in the process. A retailer might be concerned with the packaging of the product and the final customer with the design. So to keep your product in the retailer shelf you need to provide the durable packaging. I feel that these things are considered in the SSIs but on a very informal scale. The definitions of the customer requirements is very informal. QFD as a tool will provide a very logical and structured approach. QFD captures the voice of the customer. It tells all the functions to do concurrent engineering.

I would highlight the most important part of the tool. It is collecting the information from the customer. There are various sources to do so. Why SSIs don't collect the information. Firstly, the whole of the industry has lack of knowledge about the data-driven approach. Very few people realize the importance of data in analyzing and making the important decisions. I highlighted the importance of data in the process improvement using six sigma as well. The collecting of information can sound as a cumbersome task but it needs to be done in order to know the customer requirements. The important point that needs to be noted is that the collection of wrong information or from unreliable sources will lead to wrong decisions because information is the primrary base for QFD.

I came across the affinity diagrams as well. The grouping of information cab be effective and efficient using this source. The main learning point here is that perform the exercise in complete silence and the group performing the organising of data should consist of peple from varied backgrounds.Once the data is grouped in the primrary, secondary and tertiary groups it can be listed on the QFD chart. Why I find this customer requirements grouping to be useful? It is because of the next step , which is to give the importance rating based on customer data and noting the customer competitive comparisons. This tells what customer think about our product w.r.t. our competitor product. This comparitive analysis gives us three importance things- Firstly, If both the competitor product and our product have the same rating, we can then see working on which customer requirement can help us in gaining competitive advantage. Secondly, the less rated criteria tells where to improve and the high rated criteria will tell us where are we the best highlighting the need to maintain it. In order to make the best decision this comparison should be compared with the customer importance rating to know the importance of each characteristic.

I feel if the SSIs are able to do even this amount of work in QFD effectively, it is already enough for them to make the right decisions. I will keep this as the first phase of achievement in QFD if I wish to apply it. The next phase calls for looking at engineering requirements based on the customer requirements. We can now look at our competitor degign and analyze in what aspects are we better or worse than them. The relationship matrices can be beneficial in establishing the link between which design helps in achieving which customer requirement. This tool puts the complete picture in front of the manager for decision making. If there is a blank column in the relationship matrix, it means that the particular design characteristic which we thought was important does not help us fulfill any customer requirement. And in the same way, a blank row tells us that the particular customer requirement is not fulfilled by any of the desugn characteristic. It calls for making changes in the product design in order to fulfill the requireemnts.

This is the major benefit of the QFD tool. It shows the complete picture of the process and guides the manager on the next step. This tool sets the path for the new product development and takes us through the process of designing and researching about the product in the initial stages of development so that we do not make too many cahnges during the manufacturing process. I learnt that this matrix form can be helpful in decision making of any form. One example was shown by Paul during the Hoshin Kanri presentation when he helped an organisation to understand their most important area of focus using the decision making matrix. I would like to explore it further and know more about it. QFD essentially helps to make quality products. What is quality? I need to define it but I feel it starts from the leadership of the organisation. The Japanese companies have applied the Statistical Process Control and QFD very effectively in their organisations. The world knows about Japanese Quality. I need to figure out a way to use them. It starts with collecting data and putting the right processes in place I think. The next step will be to identify those right processes.

Saurabh Kukreja : 11 Feb 2019 14:31 |  Tags: Customer Management Mbe |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

RE–DESIGNING the Design

MBE always keeps on exciting me. I have had quite a few product design experiences in the manufacturing industry. But I realize now that most of the design specefications that I was part of were merely assumptions. WE have never followed a structured process of designing the product. Without trying the new approaches, I would never know the importance of following the structured process of listening to the voice of the customer. I came across two tools namely the FMECA and the Fault tree analysis. FMECA was a very structured approach. It can be very structured approach in finding the possible failures in the product. The overall ideology is that design the product to perfection in the initial stage so that there are no inflated costs in the manufacturing stage in case of defects in design. The FMECA tools helps to achieve this ideology. We start off by looking at the product failures such as breaking of the shoe sole pasting. The possible effect of this thing would be development of rashes on the feet of the customer. The cause for such a failure mode will be due to the unskilled pasting by equipment. Such a analysis of the whole product helps the manufacturer understand better the design of the product and related training needs attached with the product. This presents a complete story of the processes and the design of the product to the manufacturer. The important part is to rank the most important causes using the Severity, Occurence and detection rating. This will help the designer know exactly which place to focus on and where to work upon. The second tool was also very interesting one to follow. It is the Fault Tree Analysis. The loophole I found in this approach was that it is diificult to use before designing the product. The faults are found out and analysis is done when there is a design of product in hand. So for me it doesn't really click too much in terms of designing the product. No doubt it is a good approach and tool to find the various causes of failures. I have found Quality Function Deployment as a very effective tool and appraoch in terms of designing the product and New Product development. The voice of customer plays a very important role in the approach. Just make what customer wanrs. QFD gives us a systematic approach to know what the customer wants. The interesting part was to use the the results in QFD to determine the competitive advantage of the product from the customer perspective and the areas of improvement as well. Basically what these tools do really well is that they present the whole story of customer requirement /design/ failure modes/ process failures in front of the manufacturer or service provider in a graphical and easy viewable form. Glancing at them helps to take better decisions with respect to the requirements. But the important point to be noted is that, it is necessary to perform these functions correctly in order to make correct decisions. Any mistakes in the data collection process or any form of bias can lead to ineffective application of these tools.

Saurabh Kukreja : 05 Feb 2019 22:28 |  Tags: Management Mbe Peuss |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem