4th Unit 16m
4th Unit 16m
4th Unit 16m
That might mean tweaking a product’s features to more closely match a competitor’s
offering, or changing the scope of services you offer, or installing a new customer
relationship management (CRM) system to enable more personalized communications
with customers.
There are two basic kinds of improvement opportunities: continuous and dramatic.
Continuous improvement is incremental, involving only small adjustments to reap
sizeable advances. Dramatic improvement can only come about through reengineering
the whole internal work process.
Step-by-Step Benchmarking
Benchmarking is a simple, but detailed, five-step process:
Key Benefits
In addition to helping companies become more efficient and profitable, benchmarking
has other benefits, too, such as:
INTRODUCTION
Lean Management has adopted the principles and techniques originating as part of the
Lean Manufacturing methodology and developed them even further. Now we can
experience the benefits of Lean in management and transfer successful techniques
from the times of post war Japan to modern day business conditions.
One of the most valuable takeaways is Poka Yoke. It has become one of the most
powerful work standardization techniques and can be applied to any manufacturing or
service industry.
Its idea to prevent errors and defects from appearing in the first place is universally
applicable and has proven to be a true efficiency booster.
Meaning and Birth of Poka Yoke
The term Poka Yoke (poh-kah yoh-keh) was coined in Japan during the 1960s
by Shigeo Shingo, an industrial engineer at Toyota. Shingo also created and
formalized Zero Quality Control – a combination of Poka Yoke techniques to correct
possible defects and source inspection to prevent def Toyota Global website
Actually, the initial term was baka-yoke, meaning ‘fool-proofing’, but was later
changed because of the term’s dishonorable and offensive connotation. Poka Yoke
means ‘mistake-proofing’ or more literally – avoiding (yokeru) inadvertent errors
(poka).
Poka Yokes ensure that the right conditions exist before a process step is executed,
and thus preventing defects from occurring in the first place. Where this is not
possible, Poka Yokes perform a detective function, eliminating defects in the process
as early as possible.
Poka Yoke is any mechanism in a Lean manufacturing process that helps to
avoid mistakes.
One of the most common is when a driver of a car with manual gearbox must press on
the clutch pedal (a process step – Poka Yoke) before starting the engine. The interlock
prevents from an unintended movement of the car.
Another example is a car with an automatic transmission, which has a switch that
requires the vehicle to be in “Park” or “Neutral” before it can be started.
These serve as behavior-shaping constraints as there are actions that must be
performed before the car is allowed to start. This way, over time, the driver’s behavior
is adjusted to the requirements by repetition and habit.
Other examples can be found in the child-proof electric sockets or the washing
machine that does not start if the door is not closed properly in order to prevent
flooding. These types of automation don’t allow mistakes or incorrect operation from
the start.
These techniques can significantly improve quality and reliability of products and
processes by eliminating defects.
This approach to production fits perfectly the culture of continuous improvement,
which is also part of the Lean management arsenal.
It can also be used to fine tune improvements and process designs from six-sigma
Define – Measure – Analyze – Improve – Control (DMAIC) projects. Applying
simple Poka Yoke ideas and methods in product and process design can eliminate
both human and mechanical errors.
The flexibility of Poka Yoke allows for it not to be costly. For example, Toyota’s goal
is to implement each mistake-proofing device for under $150. Depending on the size
of the company, it can be an extremely cost-efficient endeavor.
Poka yoke is easy to implement because of its universal and rational nature. You can
follow this step by step process to apply it:
Quality pros have many names for these seven basic tools of quality, first emphasized by Kaoru
Ishikawa, a professor of engineering at Tokyo University and the father of "quality circles." Start your
quality journey by mastering these tools, and you'll have a name for them too: "indispensable."
Check sheet: A structured, prepared form for collecting and analyzing data; a generic tool that can
be adapted for a wide variety of purposes.
Control chart: Graph used to study how a process changes over time. Comparing current data to
historical control limits leads to conclusions about whether the process variation is consistent (in
control) or is unpredictable (out of control, affected by special causes of variation).
Histogram: The most commonly used graph for showing frequency distributions, or how often each
different value in a set of data occurs.
Pareto chart: A bar graph that shows which factors are more significant.
Scatter diagram: Graphs pairs of numerical data, one variable on each axis, to look for a
relationship.
Stratification: A technique that separates data gathered from a variety of sources so that patterns
can be seen (some lists replace "stratification" with "flowchart" or "run chart").
Explain in detail about the steps in FMEA
Review existing documentation and data for clues about all of the ways
each component can failure.
The list should be exhaustive – it can be paired down and items can be
combined after this initial list is generated.
There will likely be several potential failures for each component.
The effect is the impact the failure has on the end product or on
subsequent steps in the process.
There will likely be more than one effect for each failure.
People encounter risk in nearly everything they do. And while they often do not quantify
consciously most of the risk in their lives, survival and personal success require that
they assess each perceived risk to decide how to deal with it.
Risk assessment is an innately human activity and any nominal assessment of risk
requires evaluating the severity of an event and factoring that severity by a probability
that the event will occur. For example, being struck by lightning is an event that most
people would prefer to avoid – one reason why people do not climb metal towers in a
thunderstorm.
Risks, however, are balanced with the potential reward of a successful outcome, which
is why many people are willing to play golf in a thunderstorm. Such risk analysis is
intuitive to most people, and the FMEA simply involves taking that individual cognitive
process and transforming it so that it can be performed, documented and repeated in a
team environment.
The FMEA allows practitioners to identify an outcome (effect) and quantify it based on
its level of severity, using an ordinal scale from 1 to 10. Then it asks: How likely is that
effect to occur? Assuming that an effect is the result of a chain of events (root cause to
failure mode to effect), then the likelihood of the effect depends on the difference
between how often the chain of events is started and how often, once started, the chain
of events is stopped. Frequency of occurrence is the term used to describe how often the
chain of events is initiated by any root cause. The ability to halt the chain of events is
called detectability. The overall evaluation of risk is a product of the severity of the effect,
frequency of occurrence and detectability; the resultant value is the risk priority number
(RPN).
Ironically, the arithmetic calculation of RPN has nothing to do with the failure mode (only the
root cause and effect), but the derivation of the components of RPN has everything to do with
the failure mode. The failure mode is often the element of the root cause-failure-effect chain that
can be readily defined in the processes. Failure modes are the parts of the process which can
be seen and are most appropriate for process teams to examine.
Deceptive Simplicity
The challenge with the FMEA is that it is not that simple in practice. It is easy for teams
to confuse root causes with failure modes, and even failure modes with effects.
Frequency of occurrence for root causes often cannot be quantified. Severity
quantifications are subjective at best.
Actually creating an FMEA from scratch is one of the most painful endeavors a project
team will undertake, but also one of the most rewarding. In the meticulous analysis and
thorough discussions about extracting the various root cause-failure mode-effect
sequences for each process stage, team members describe, synthesize and experience
their processes in an entirely new way. It is this process view that drives breakthrough
thinking and breakthrough results – and why the FMEA remains one of the staples in
the Six Sigma menu of tools.
In spite of this breakthrough potential, the FMEA as a process discovery and root cause
prioritization tool carries a heavy price in team effort and time. But that risk can be
managed if practitioners see the FMEA for what it really is: a process documentation
tool. Standardized approaches in most industries use the FMEA as a process
documentation tool, as outlined in Automotive Industry Action Group publications. This
is a fine idea, although documentation alone does not create value. If FMEAs are used
to create documentation that will be stored in a file and only produced upon the request
of a customer, they are expensive devices for placating customer demands.
Fundamentally the FMEA has two value-enhancing applications: process management and
process improvement. To the extent that the FMEA is applied as a process documentation tool,
its primary value should result from monitoring process performance through fluctuations in
RPNs. The risk of negative consequences will change daily based primarily on changes in
frequency of occurrence for root causes; when root causes with high RPNs become top
priorities, process team members can decide what actions will be addressed, by whom and
when. This is called a response plan. FMEAs used as part of a response plan are particularly
effective in DMAIC projects in the Improve and Control phases.
As discussed earlier, the FMEA also is very effective as a process discovery and root
cause prioritization tool. This is not how the FMEA was designed to be used, but it can
help when building process understanding concentrated on one or a few parts of the
process. The area of focus for the FMEA should be guided by the use of process maps,
fishbone diagrams, and cause-and-effect matrices. Application of the FMEA for root
cause discovery should be limited to no more than eight process steps for a typical
DMAIC project. This focus helps to conserve and contain the mental energy of the
team, which needs to produce a viable list of prioritized root causes to the process
problem noted in the problem statement. Once a DMAIC project moves into the Improve
and Control phases, the original design intent of the FMEA can be applied as
necessary, particularly if the format is already part of the organization’s standard
process documentation or management system.
Introduction
Quality must be designed into the product, not inspected into it. Quality can be defined as meeting
customer needs and providing superior value. This focus on satisfying the customer’s needs places
an emphasis on techniques such as Quality Function Deployment to help understand those needs
and plan a product to provide superior value.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a structured approach to defining customer needs or
requirements and translating them into specific plans to produce products to meet those needs. The
“voice of the customer” is the term to describe these stated and unstated customer needs or
requirements. The voice of the customer is captured in a variety of ways: direct discussion or
interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data, field reports,
etc. This understanding of the customer needs is then summarized in a product planning matrix or
“house of quality”. These matrices are used to translate higher level “what’s” or needs into lower
level “how’s” – product requirements or technical characteristics to satisfy these needs.
While the Quality Function Deployment matrices are a good communication tool at each step in the
process, the matrices are the means and not the end. The real value is in the process of
communicating and decision-making with QFD. QFD is oriented toward involving a team of people
representing the various functional departments that have involvement in product development:
Marketing, Design Engineering, Quality Assurance, Manufacturing/ Manufacturing Engineering, Test
Engineering, Finance, Product Support, etc.
The active involvement of these departments can lead to balanced consideration of the requirements
or “what’s” at each stage of this translation process and provide a mechanism to communicate
hidden knowledge – knowledge that is known by one individual or department but may not otherwise
be communicated through the organization. The structure of this methodology helps development
personnel understand essential requirements, internal capabilities, and constraints and design the
product so that everything is in place to achieve the desired outcome – a satisfied customer. Quality
Function Deployment helps development personnel maintain a correct focus on true requirements
and minimizes misinterpreting customer needs. As a result, QFD is an effective communications and
quality planning tool.
1. Customer needs or requirements are stated on the left side of the matrix as shown below.
These are organized by category based on the affinity diagrams. Insure the customer needs
or requirements reflect the desired market segment(s). Address the unspoken needs
(assumed and excitement capabilities). If the number of needs or requirements exceeds
twenty to thirty items, decompose the matrix into smaller modules or subsystems to reduce
the number of requirements in a matrix. For each need or requirement, state the customer
priorities using a 1 to 5 rating. Use ranking techniques and paired comparisons to develop
priorities.
2. Evaluate prior generation products against competitive products. Use surveys, customer
meetings or focus groups/clinics to obtain feedback. Include competitor’s customers to get a
balanced perspective. Identify price points and market segments for products under
evaluation. Identify warranty, service, reliability, and customer complaint problems to identify
areas of improvement. Based on this, develop a product strategy. Consider the current
strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition? How do these strengths and
weaknesses compare to the customer priorities? Where does the gap need to be closed and
how can this be done – copying the competition or using a new approach or technology?
Identify opportunities for breakthroughs to exceed competitor’s capabilities, areas for
improvement to equal competitors capabilities, and areas where no improvement will be
made. This strategy is important to focus development efforts where they will have the
greatest payoff.
3. Establish product requirements or technical characteristics to respond to customer
requirements and organize into related categories. Characteristics should be meaningful,
measurable, and global. Characteristics should be stated in a way to avoid implying a
particular technical solution so as not to constrain designers.
4. Develop relationships between customer requirements and product requirements or
technical characteristics. Use symbols for strong, medium and weak relationships. Be
sparing with the strong relationship symbol. Have all customer needs or requirement been
addressed? Are there product requirements or technical characteristics stated that don’t
relate to customer needs?
5. Develop a technical evaluation of prior generation products and competitive products. Get
access to competitive products to perform product or technical benchmarking. Perform this
evaluation based on the defined product requirements or technical characteristics. Obtain
other relevant data such as warranty or service repair occurrences and costs and consider
this data in the technical evaluation.
6. Develop preliminary target values for product requirements or technical characteristics.
7. Determine potential positive and negative interactions between product requirements or
technical characteristics using symbols for strong or medium, positive or negative
relationships. Too many positive interactions suggest potential redundancy in “the critical
few” product requirements or technical characteristics. Focus on negative interactions –
consider product concepts or technology to overcome these potential tradeoff’s or consider
the tradeoff’s in establishing target values.
8. Calculate importance ratings. Assign a weighting factor to relationship symbols (9-3-1, 4-2-1,
or 5-3-1). Multiply the customer importance rating by the weighting factor in each box of the
matrix and add the resulting products in each column.
9. Develop a difficulty rating (1 to 5 point scale, five being very difficult and risky) for each
product requirement or technical characteristic. Consider technology maturity, personnel
technical qualifications, business risk, manufacturing capability, supplier/subcontractor
capability, cost, and schedule. Avoid too many difficult/high risk items as this will likely delay
development and exceed budgets. Assess whether the difficult items can be accomplished
within the project budget and schedule.
10. Analyze the matrix and finalize the product development strategy and product plans.
Determine required actions and areas of focus. Finalize target values. Are target values
properly set to reflect appropriate tradeoff’s? Do target values need to be adjusted
considering the difficulty rating? Are they realistic with respect to the price points, available
technology, and the difficulty rating? Are they reasonable with respect to the importance
ratings? Determine items for further QFD deployment. To maintain focus on “the critical few”,
less significant items may be ignored with the subsequent QFD matrices. Maintain the
product planning matrix as customer requirements or conditions change.
One of the guidelines for successful QFD matrices is to keep the amount of information in each
matrix at a manageable level. With a more complex product, if one hundred potential needs or
requirements were identified, and these were translated into an equal or even greater number of
product requirements or technical characteristics, there would be more than 10,000 potential
relationships to plan and manage. This becomes an impossible number to comprehend and
manage. It is suggested that an individual matrix not address more than twenty or thirty items on
each dimension of the matrix. Therefore, a larger, more complex product should have its customers
needs decomposed into hierarchical levels.
To summarize the initial process, a product plan is developed based on initial market research or
requirements definition. If necessary, feasibility studies or research and development are undertaken
to determine the feasibility of the product concept. Product requirements or technical characteristics
are defined through the matrix, a business justification is prepared and approved, and product
design then commences.
The product requirements or technical characteristics defined in the product planning matrix become
the “what’s” that are listed down the left side of the deployment matrix along with priorities (based on
the product planning matrix importance ratings) and target values. The deployment matrix is
prepared in a manner very similar to the product planning matrix. These product requirements or
technical characteristics are translated into critical subsystem, assembly or part characteristics. This
translation considers criticality of the subsystem, assembly or parts as well as their characteristics
from a performance perspective to complement consideration of criticality from a quality and
reliability perspective.
Relationships are established between product requirements or technical characteristics and the
critical subsystem, assembly or part characteristics. Importance ratings are calculated and target
values for each critical subsystem, assembly or part characteristic are established. An example of a
part/assembly deployment matrix is shown:
Process Design
Quality Function Deployment continues this translation and planning into the process design phase.
A concept selection matrix can be used to evaluate different manufacturing process approaches and
select the preferred approach. Based on this, the process planning matrix shown below is prepared.
Again, the “how’s” from the higher-level matrix (in this case the critical subsystem, assembly or part
characteristics) become the “what’s” which are used to plan the process for fabricating and
assembling the product. Important processes and tooling requirements can be identified to focus
efforts to control, improve and upgrade processes and equipment. At this stage, communication
between Engineering and Manufacturing is emphasized and trade-off’s can be made as appropriate
to achieve mutual goals based on the customer needs.
In addition to planning manufacturing processes, more detailed planning related to process control,
quality control, set-up, equipment maintenance and testing can be supported by additional matrices.
The following provides an example of a process/quality control matrix.
The process steps developed in the process planning matrix are used as the basis for planning and
defining specific process and quality control steps in this matrix.
The result of this planning and decision-making is that Manufacturing focuses on the critical
processes, dimensions and characteristics that will have a significant effect on producing a product
that meets customers’ needs. There is a clear trail from customer needs to the design and
manufacturing decisions to satisfy those customer needs. Disagreements over what is important at
each stage of the development process should be minimized, and there will be greater focus on “the
critical few” items that affect the success of the product.
QFD Process
Quality Function Deployment begins with product planning; continues with product design and
process design; and finishes with process control, quality control, testing, equipment maintenance,
and training. As a result, this process requires multiple functional disciplines to adequately address
this range of activities. QFD is synergistic with multi-function product development teams. It can
provide a structured process for these teams to begin communicating, making decisions and
planning the product. It is a useful methodology, along with product development teams, to support a
concurrent engineering or integrated product development approach.
Quality Function Deployment, by its very structure and planning approach, requires that more time
be spent up-front in the development process making sure that the team determines, understands
and agrees with what needs to be done before plunging into design activities. As a result, less time
will be spent downstream because of differences of opinion over design issues or redesign because
the product was not on target. It leads to consensus decisions, greater commitment to the
development effort, better coordination, and reduced time over the course of the development effort.
QFD requires discipline. It is not necessarily easy to get started with. The following is a list of
recommendations to facilitate initially using QFD.
Obtain management commitment to use QFD.
Establish clear objectives and scope of QFD use. Avoid first using it on a large, complex
project if possible. Will it be used for the overall product or applied to a subsystem, module,
assembly or critical part? Will the complete QFD methodology be used or will only the
product planning matrix be completed?
Establish multi-functional team. Get an adequate time commitment from team members.
Obtain QFD training with practical hands-on exercises to learn the methodology and use a
facilitator to guide the initial efforts.
Schedule regular meetings to maintain focus and avoid the crush of the development
schedule overshadowing effective planning and decision-making.
Avoid gathering perfect data. Many times, significant customer insights and data exist within
the organization, but they are in the form of hidden knowledge – not communicated to people
with the need for this information. On the other hand, it may be necessary to spend
additional time gathering the voice of the customer before beginning QFD. Avoid technical
arrogance and the belief that company personnel know more than the customer.
Quality Function Deployment is an extremely useful methodology to facilitate communication,
planning, and decision-making within a product development team. It is not a paperwork exercise or
additional documentation that must be completed in order to proceed to the next development
milestone. It not only brings the new product closer to the intended target, but reduces development
cycle time and cost in the process.
Benefits of QFD
The main 'process' benefits of using QFD are: improved communication and
sharing of information within a cross-functional team charged with developing a
new product. This team will typically include people from a variety of functional
groups, such as marketing, sales, service, distribution, product engineering, process
engineering, procurement, and production the identification of 'holes' in the current
knowledge of the design team the capture and display of a wide variety of
important design information in one place in a compact form support for
understanding, consensus, and decision making, especially when complex
relationships and trade-offs are involved the creation of an informational base
which is valuable for repeated cycles of product improvement
The main 'bottom line' benefits of using QFD are: greater likelihood of product
success in the marketplace, due to the precise targeting of key customer
requirements reduced overall design cycle time, mainly due to a reduction in time-
consuming design changes. This is a powerful benefit: customer requirements are
less likely to have changed since the beginning of the design project; and more
frequent design cycles mean that products can be improved more rapidly than the
competition reduced overall cost due to reducing design changes, which are not
only time consuming but very costly, especially those which occur at a late stage.
reduced product cost by eliminating redundant features and over-design. When to
use QFD QFD is a powerful tool that leads to significant improvements in
product/process performances. However, it is not a short-term answer to product
development problems.
The method on which QFD is implemented may have a large impact on
benefits derived and companies should take up QFD only after getting the consent
and commitment of the team members. QFD provides a systematic approach to
build a team perspective on what needs to be done, the best ways to do it, the best
order to accomplish the tasks proposed and the staffing and resources required to
enhance customer satisfaction. It is also a good format for capturing and
recording/documenting decision making. Applied through the Kaizen philosophy
under Total Quality Control, QFD is the most highly developed form of integrated
product and process development in existence.