Operations Management and Supply Chain

Write a short essay (about 1,000 words) comparing QFD with an

alternative approach to requirements development and analysis.

The quality of a product or service is a key element in creating customer satisfaction. The
level of satisfaction is ultimately dependent on the fulfilment of customer needs. The Kano
survey is a valuable tool for capturing the voice of the customer (VOC), providing critical
information on the importance of products and services and the level of satisfaction from the
customer’s perspective. Quality function deployment (QFD) is an important tool in
translating VOC into product specifications. It is the only comprehensive quality tool aimed
specifically at translating and comparing customer satisfaction measures. Used in
combination, the Kano survey and QFD tools provide companies with the ability to maximize
customer satisfaction (positive quality) measured by metrics such as repeat business and
market share. There are significant benefits in using the Kano method to capture client
perception and the QFD model to understand the relationship between product features and
customer satisfaction.

The Kano Model of product development and customer satisfaction was published in 1984 by
Dr Noriaki Kano, professor of quality management at the Tokyo University of Science.

Kano says that a product or service is about much more than just functionality. It is also about
customers' emotions. For example, all customers who buy a new car expect it to stop when
they hit the brakes, but many will be delighted by its voice-activated parking-assist system.

The model encourages you to think about how your products relate to your customers' needs,
while moving from a "more is always better" approach to product development to a "less is
more" approach.

Constantly introducing new features to a product can be expensive and may just add to its
complexity without boosting customer satisfaction. On the other hand, adding one
particularly attractive feature could delight customers and increase sales without costing
significantly more.

How Does the Kano Model Work?

The model assigns three types of attribute (or property) to products and services:
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1. Threshold Attributes (Basics).

These are the basic features that customers expect a product or service to have.

For example, when you book into a hotel, you'd expect hot water and a bed with clean linen
as an absolute minimum.

2. Performance Attributes (Satisfiers).

These elements are not absolutely necessary, but they increase a customer's
enjoyment of the product or service.

Returning to our example, you'd be pleased to discover that your hotel room had free
superfast broadband and an HD TV, when you'd normally expect to find paid-for wi-fi and a
standard TV.

3. Excitement Attributes (Delighters).

These are the surprise elements that can really boost your product's competitive edge

. They are the features that customers don't even know they want, but are delighted with
when they find them.

In your hotel room, that might be finding the complimentary Belgian chocolates that the
evening turn-down service has left on the bed.

Figure 1, below, illustrates how the presence (or absence) of each of the three attributes in a
product or service can affect customer satisfaction

Figure 1 – The Kano Model

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You can see that, if a product's features don't meet a customer's Threshold Attributes, his or
her satisfaction levels will be very low. However, even if you fully deliver on these, you
won't impress customers that much.

Most products compete on Performance Attributes, where a customer weighs up one product
against another and judge’s satisfaction by the availability of various features.

But she may discover an Excitement Attribute that really appeals to her, and gives her high
satisfaction, even if it isn't perfectly implemented.

Figure 2, below, shows how customers' reactions to certain features (or the lack of them) can
also have a negative or zero effect on satisfaction levels.
Operations Management and Supply Chain

How to use it:

Craft a questionnaire with each feature listed separately. For each feature, ideally you
demonstrate what the feature can do through a prototype or interactive wireframe, when
possible. Don’t spend much time prototyping for this: it’s just a prototype to get the idea
across. Some people can get really tied up in the details even in prototypes, because they may
like the idea, but not how it was implemented.
Operations Management and Supply Chain

Benefits

The Kano model is very good at prioritizing features. A theory that underlies the Kano model
is what Daniel Zacarias calls “the natural decay of delight.” Innovative ideas and products
move from being exciting and new, at the top of the Kano chart (Attractive) to expected
features, at the bottom (Must-haves at best, detractors, at worst).

Take wireless Internet as an example*. It’s 2001, and you’re traveling for work, and have a
top of the line laptop that has an ethernet port and WiFi. You’re at a hotel, and you learn that
they have ethernet ports for you to connect to the Internet. They don’t have wireless Internet
included in your room rate, but you can get WiFi in their business center. You’re stoked! It’s
amazing! What great options!

Fast forward to 2017. You’re traveling for work and have a basic laptop that has WiFi.
You’re at a hotel, and you learn that they have ethernet ports for you to connect to the
Internet. They don’t have wireless Internet included in your room rate, but you can get WiFi
Operations Management and Supply Chain

in their business center. You’re furious! What planet is this hotel from that you have to pay
extra for Internet?! And who still uses their ethernet port to connect to the Internet anymore?

What started out as an attractive feature (ethernet ports in the room, and WiFi in the business
center), 16 years later turned into an undesired feature.

If teams aren’t clued in to what customers want, they could be focused on features that are
expected instead of attractive. One of the IBM researchers who’d used the Kano model noted
this on her own team: “There were some features that the team was very excited about, and
then realized that those were table stakes.”

Additional Potential

As we discussed the Kano model, we theorized it has the potential for a few other things, too:

1. Gauging the depth of pain points

2. Baselining features over a product lifecycle to assess the natural decay of delight over
time.

In the example, a Kano questionnaire was designed to understand customer requirements and
identify opportunities to improve the service provided by the help desk. First, key services
offered through the help desk were analysed to create a list of inputs for the questionnaire.
These included:

 Response time
 Quality of reply
 Ease of use of the tool
 Relevance of the help desk in projects
 Clarity of communication
 Usefulness of the help desk-FAQ function
 Help desk discussion forum usage
 Usefulness of user manual
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When AHP software for PCs became available, Dr. Akao and his colleagues immediately
recommended replacing the ordinal rating scales used in early QFD. Unfortunately, this was
after the U.S. auto industry had begun publishing the old math in books and articles, which
were then spread around the world. Those of us who continued to study QFD with. Dr.Akao
and his colleagues also made the change and this is what we teach today in modern
QFD.AHP gives more precision than ordinal ratings. If you custom-tailored QFD process and
then use matrices to deploy customer needs downstream (most QFDs will not need matrices
at the start), take care not to dilute this precision by re-introducing ordinal ratings in the
relationship matrix, competitive benchmarking, FMEA, and elsewhere, especially when it is
actually easier to employ AHP. When using advanced tools such as QFD and AHP, domain
expertise is necessary to get accurate prioritizations. Thus, for customers to accurately
prioritize customer needs, they need to have deep domain knowledge or subject matter
expertise. Customer needs reflect the discrete data set where they are experts. There are many
sources of raw "voice of customer data" such as interviews, surveys, field reports, etc. Gemba
is a source unique to QFD. In the Japanese quality movement, gemba usually refers to our
company's manufacturing floor, a source of information about processes and the root cause of
failures. This is sufficient for existing product defects, however, the power of QFD lies in
assuring the successful quality of future produces BEFORE the production gemba begins, i.e.
in design. Thus, we go to the customer's gemba to identify what failures they have in their
processes, as well as successes that must be protected during redesign. Gemba visits require
resources and therefore we must strategically plan to do the most important visits first. 

Conclusion:

We were left with one open question at the end of our discussion: is the Kano model useful
if you can’t impact the product? You may not be able to impact the product because it’s
already under development, because of management pushback, because the design team is
only temporarily part of the product team, etc. Is going through the effort of using the Kano
model worth it?

Or, maybe it’s still useful even if you can’t impact the product
Operations Management and Supply Chain

Reference:

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_97.htm

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Are_there_any_other_tools_apart_from_QFD_which_can_
be_used_to_translate_the_customer_requirements_into_technical_specifications

https://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model

https://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/

https://medium.com/design-ibm/kano-model-ways-to-use-it-and-not-use-it-1d205a9cf808