This presentation will discuss the integration of Modern Blitz QFD ^® and Pathfinder, a Systems Engineering (SE) approach developed at Rolls Royce.

	image by wikipedia Tosaka / Rolls Royce

In addition to the modern QFD tools such as Projects Goals Table, Customer Segment Table, Affinity Diagram, Hierarchy Diagram, AHP, and Maximum Value Table, the flow of Pathfinder tools such as Stakeholder Map / Context and Boundary Diagrams and Viewpoint Analysis are employed. The paper will support the ISO 196355 standard to reference good practice and evidence of usage in industry.

Speaker: Steve Dimelow, QFD Green Belt^®, Systems Engineering Specialist, Rolls-Royce plc., United Kingdom

In 2009, the QFD Institute was asked to convene an ISO Working Group to write an international standard for QFD. The biggest concern was how to standardize a method that works best when custom-tailored to the new product development (NPD) process of an organization, as well as for its specific products and customers.

The International Council for QFD liaised its members with others from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and India to form a group of experts to write the new ISO 16355 series standard for quality function deployment. In June 2016, the five QFD parts were approved for publication with the remaining three parts not far behind. This paper and presentation will outline the structure of the eight parts, how they build on older QFD models from the 1970s and 80s, and what you need to do to become a leader and facilitator of this Modern QFD standard.

ISO 16355 is already attracting the attention of quality organizations, Six Sigma, and Lean professionals. In addition to its overall guidance on new product development, the eight parts of the standard cover the gamut from strategic hoshin planning, competitiveness, project management, on-site customer visits, survey design, prioritization, quality assurance, innovation, cost management, reliability, optimization, supplier management, make and build, commercialization, support, retirement, and flow to next generation products. ISO 16355 includes case studies and examples from product, service, information technology, and process industries from all over the world. The standard includes upgrades to both the classical House of Quality and well as the more streamlined Blitz QFD ^®.

NPD professionals will want to master these global best practices so they can engage their organizations in surging ahead of their competitors in creating the truly great products their customers demand.

Speaker: Glenn Mazur, QFD Red Belt^®, QFD Institute, International Academy for Quality

Traditional QFD uses ordinal weights-percentages of a total to describe priorities for customer's needs and technical solution approaches. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), on the other hand,  works with profiles-vectors of unit length one, making it mathematically possible to add, subtract and compare profiles.

The ratio method proposed by Saaty to calculate priority profiles in AHP has been a part of Modern QFD for some time. In fact, the new ISO standard 16335 suggests using the ratio scales and profiles in QFD, instead of the ordinal correlation strength indicators.

Not understanding how to properly apply AHP in QFD, however, could lead to project failures, especially if you are still using the traditional House of Quality matrix.  AHP is used in many steps in QFD, but this paper and presentation will focus primarily on the House of Quality matrix.

Speaker: Thomas Fehlmann, Ph.D., Senior Consultant, Euro Project Office AG, Switzerland

The Soft Systems Method was developed by Peter Checkland's team at Lancaster University in the 1970s to help analyse complex situations or 'soft problems' where the problem for which a solution is sought is not clearly understood, or for which differences of opinion exist as to the precise nature of the problem.

Such a 'soft problem' exists in the development of sustainable (economic and environmental) energy systems. This paper will illustrate how modern QFD methods described in the 'ISO 16355 standard for QFD' have been used in the UK's Energy Technologies Institute to help in the analysis of the 'soft problem' of transition to low-CO2 energy systems. Illustrations will be given on how these methods can be used to establish system specifications and designs.

Speaker: Dr. Kim Stansfield, QFD Black Belt^®, Senior Teaching Fellow, Warwick University WMG, United Kingdom

Although total quality management (TQM) was introduced to China in the 1980s, it is only recently that Chinese manufacturers began recognizing its importance. To be qualified as a vendor, whether in international B2B or domestic B2C business, Chinese manufacturers so far have resorted to sales-focused strategies that worked well in the rapid growth m arkets but are now proving to be insufficient as they face increasing competition from emerging countries that offer even cheaper labor and declining global economy that affects the purchasing powers of their overseas customers.

Added to this are Chinese organizational culture and Chinese way of implementing TQM that are not helping. This paper begins by introducing the problems associated with Chinese introduction of TQM and their traditional implementation approach. It then explains why introducing QFD is an essential business strategy for Chinese manufacturers in their pursuit for sustainable success in the global market.

This presentation begins with the importance of understanding requirements as part of proactive quality management and the need for early requirements validation for product development process. For this, using three dimensional virtual reality (3D VR) early on allows developers to visually illustrate or simulate product features and functions.

The virtual prototypes generated could ascertain the actual areas of consumer interest in connection with an eye tracking system. Then, the unstructured data must be further processed and placed in a contextual analysis.

Integrated into the QFD, it is possible to restructure the requirements at an early stage. Based on clear requirement structures, the results of this proactive quality measure can lead to better product quality..

Speaker: Christian Esser, Research Assistant, Unversität Kassel, Germany

The internet of things (IoT) is the integration of things via the internet. This integration is done by having sensors on the things to collect data, and then these data are shared via the internet, enabling the things to work together and making the whole much greater than individual things -- when it is done right.

But how can all these things work together effectively? This question is similar to the question which QFD always asks: What is the voice of the customer (VOC) regarding the important qualities of a product? When product engineers or producers respect the VOC, then the value, including the effectiveness, of the product is improved.

The immediate goal of this research is to show how QFD can be used in the developing smart schools. The long-range goals are to make and support the claim that by integrating QFD into IoT, the value and usefulness of IoT will improve and to note that in IoT the VOC is often the voice of a large and very diverse group. Thus, in IoT the way the VOC is heard, understood, and applied may require a modification of QFD procedures.

Today, we embark on a new quest: the Internet of Things (IoT). It has been understood that agile methods are the only ones capable of handling the complexity of developing software against unknown customer requirements. What has paved the way was understanding that the aim of software development is not only well-engineered code but understanding the needs of the customer and translating them into a language that machines can understand. For traditional engineers, this looks frightening. For QFD professionals, it sounds familiar.

An even more challenging is to master multitude intelligent things around us. Things talk to each other, exchange information affecting behavior without direct human control. Seats on transportation systems could lock out because internal intelligent decided they're out of service. Medicine cabinets could deny access because software cannot authenticate the doctor. Even autonomous vehicles can crash for system errors or human over-trust. How can we avoid these issues? This is especially difficult if constraints and operating environments are unknown in advance.

The theory of Combinatory Logic, part of constructive mathematics, has a model that is very useful when dealing with unknown cause-and-effect relationships. It is called Combinatory Algebra and can be seen as a generalization of QFD as it deals with infinite cause-and-effect relationships. From a finite set of Ishikawa Diagrams, it is quite possible to build a finite QFD matrix, but with combinatory algebra, it is just as possible to construct infinite rule sets from an infinite number of cause-and-effect diagrams that resemble QFD.

Combinatory algebra lays the theoretical foundations for managing complexity in the IoT. This paper and presentation will show the model of combinatory logics and how QFD implements such a model in practice. It explains how to model IoT collections as combinatory algebras and discusses new approaches based on theory for predicting strange and unforeseeable conditions and how the "things" behave under them. A case study in IoT testing how QFD could evolve in the near future is introduced.

Speaker: Thomas Fehlmann, Senior Researcher, Euro Project Office AG, Switzerland

To accelerate the development life cycle of a software product, the incremental development life cycle models, such as spiral and agile model, have been introduced. However, due to the immaturity of the specification during the incremental cycle, the number of changes of requirements is big. Even with conventional waterfall model, there is no way to avoid the change of requirements to occur after the phase of requirements. So, rather than try to perform requirements analysis to obtain perfect coverage of requirements, it is easier to just accept the potential of requirements change as a risk.

There is a large body of knowledge concerning the assessment of the quality and marketing of tangible products. QFD helps to operationalize and integrate quantitative and non-quantitative measures into a sound marketing mix elaborating the classical 4P's.

There are several advanced QFD approaches to address these additional instrumental marketing dimensions such as Service Deployment, integration of QFD and Design, Ethical QFD, and the Analysis of Beliefs among many others. However there is no framework to integrate these methods and to couple them with other instruments from service marketing and other disciplines in a feasible and sound way. The paper proposes such a framework for a better understanding of the composition of integrative instruments with QFD and supporting the dissemination of QFD approaches within service marketing

Speaker: Wolfram Pietsch, Prof. Dr., Dept. of Business Studies, Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Germany

An invaluable panel discussion by QFD pioneers from various countries:

• Dr. Shindo, professor emeritus of University of Yamanashi in Japan, is the earliest colleague of Dr. Akao and witness to the concept development. He is going to speak on the origins of Japanese QFD.
• Bob King, founder and ex-CEO of GOAL/QPC, is one of the first Americans to introduce QFD to the English-language world. He will speak on its beginnings and growth in the U.S.
• Harold Ross, who held various management positions at General Motors Vehicle Development and Systems Engineering, will speak on the introduction of QFD at GM thirty years ago.
• Dr. Herzwurm, professor of Business Administration and Information Systems at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and a founder of QFD-Institut Deutschland, will speak on the state of QFD in Germany and EU region.
• Dr. Catherine Chan, professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and president of Hong Kong QFD Association, will report on the recent dissemination of QFD in Chinese language countries.
• Glenn Mazur, executive director of QFD Institute and convenor of ISO 16355, will speak on the history of modern advancements, the new ISO and future prospect.

Today manufacturing companies need to be able to quickly adapt to global markets. They must shorten production time and make use of the most effective set of on-site logistics processes to keep up the production pace and maintain profit margins. This study introduces an academic approach by examining the combined use of job function deployment and methods engineering for enhancement of on-site logistics and production processes, to bring about continuous positive results, i.e. "Kaizen."

Job function deployment is a method that helps transform customer needs into engineering attributes for a service or product. Methods engineering is a domain of industrial engineering that deals with human integration and manufacturing engineering. These two methodologies used together, can help companies achieve "KAIZEN" as understood in the context of Japanese corporate culture and philosophy, a success that even non-Japanese companies can emulate..

Software QFD represents a variant of QFD for developing software products. First applications took place in the late 1970s in Japan and in the late 1980s in the US. More extensive use of Software QFD started in the 1990s and since then many companies (e.g. IBM, Motorola, SAP and Siemens) have reported on the success of their Software QFD implementations. So not surprisingly, a literature review conducted by the authors in 2015 found a total of 176 publications which directly or indirectly address the application of QFD within software development.

In this research, these publications are analyzed with respect to several  viewpoints:

• Corresponding type of Software QFD model used (i.e. traditional, comprehensive, focused or dynamic software QFD);
• reported case study and involved application domain (e.g. business software vs. technical software);
• form of embedding QFD into the software development process and its relation to project management activities;
• essential methodological characteristics like the involved stakeholders, the form of teamwork, the rigor of separating needs and solutions, the accuracy of prioritization, and used QFD elements such as customer voice tables, affinity diagrams or quality matrices; and
• consideration of multidisciplinary issues as well as the possibility of reacting to changing working environments caused by digitalization and industry 4.0.

Based on the findings of this analysis we will give an outlook on the future use of QFD in software development.

 

Speaker: Georg Herzwurm, Prof. Dr., University Stuttgart, Germany