Page 73 - DMGT524_TOTAL_QUALITY_MANAGEMENT

Total Quality Management

Notes Understanding the market and competitive environment you’re entering, and as a
result of these understandings;

Making solid, well-thought-out plans to meet your objectives.
“When you have developed your strategy, you should have an objective, methodical
business plan that looks at what customers need and what you are going to do about those
needs,” says Collett. “Then you can take this document back to the customer and verify its
accuracy.”
A crucial element of making the 10-step business planning process work is what John
Doyle, HP executive vice president for Systems Technology, calls “Imaginative
Understanding of Users’ Needs” (IUUN). “IUUN is becoming an” integral part of how HP
does business,” Collett reports, adding that the philosophy of IUUN is to hear what
customers say their needs are, and apply the creativity and knowledge you have to create
solutions for customers.
Quality Function Deployment
While IUUN is critical to the success of the business planning process, Quality Function
Deployment (QFD) is critical to the success of IUUN. QFD is the philosophy of designing
your processes in response to customer needs.

“Before QFD, we didn’t always realise the importance of understanding customer needs,”
says Collett. “As a result, we often invented products that we thought people such as
ourselves would want, instead of asking our customers what they wanted.”
Currently, the Division uses QFD in its R&D and marketing areas. “It helps us find out
what our customers need so that we can build these needs into the next generation of our
products.”
QFD’s Planning Matrix
One of the most important tools in QFD is the Planning Matrix. Once you know what your
customers’ requirements are, the next step is to translate these data into product
development plans. The Planning Matrix plots customer requirements on one axis and
business processes and their measures or product features on the other axis. The idea is to
be able to determine the fit between customer needs and product features. “The Planning
Matrix puts a lot more objectivity into the product development process,” notes Collett.
Here’s How it Works
Down the left side of the matrix are rows of user needs. Across the top of the matrix are
columns of product features. With the matrix, you can see where a row intersects with a
column and in that cell, ask yourself if there is a strong relationship, a weak relationship,
or no relationship between what the customer requires and what your company is doing.
If you find no relationship on a highly rated need as ranked by the customer, then you
need to look at your product design plan and address problem, since the customer considers
it important. Conversely, if you are building in steps in the design process that have no
bearing on customer needs, you may be able to eliminate them. For example, you may be
doing test procedures on something that the customer doesn’t care about.
R&D then creates another matrix of customer needs by process control characteristics (or
internal manufacturing control characteristics) that will have to be met in order to give
customers the features that they want. In short, the system translates raw customer data
into focused activities for helping Marketing, R&D, Manufacturing, and Quality to make
the desired product a reality.
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