Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): HKSQ AGM 2016 and QFD Seminar

A seminar named “You cannot design tomorrow's products using yesterday's QFD” was organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) after the 27^th HKSQ Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 12 Aug 2016. I would like to share both HKSQ AGM 2016 and Seminar below.

Mr. Peter Fung (Chairman, HKSQ) held the meeting and briefed the Chairman report to all members. Until now, HKSQ has 366 individual members, 4 student members and 13 corporate members (by invitation only). Then Peter briefed HKSQ activities in 2015/2016 including study mission to Purzer Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Taipei, technical visit, international networking and student project competition in LSG Sky Chefs.

After that our Hon. Treasurer Mr. Karson Chui presented HKSQ financial status in the official report and unaudited report.

Ms. Minda Chiang (Hon. Secretary) reported all participants tonight and AGM agenda. The nominations of Office Bearers in 2016/2017 were shown below.

Chairman: Mr. Peter Fung

Vice Chairman: Ms. Angela Wong

Hon. Secretary: Ms. Sherman Ngan

Hon Treasurer: Dr. Lotto Lai

After that the AGM seminar guest speaker was Dr. Catherine Chan and his topic named “You cannot design tomorrow's products using yesterday's QFD”. Firstly, she introduced the new QFD standard ISO 163555.

Then she introduced Mr. Glenn Mazur who was Executive Director of QFD Institute, USA and the first person presented this standard in ASQ World Conference for Quality and Improvement (WCQI). (Remark: I attended his presentation with the topic named “ISO 16355: A Standard for Innovative Customer Experience” in WCQI on 17 May 2016 (WCQI Day 2))

Dr. Catherine Chan mentioned the purpose of ISO 163555 were “to elevate quality professionals to take on a leadership role in new product development” and “to invigorate the Lean-6-Sigma Tool Set with QFD’s Front-End Methods & Tools”. The standard framework was shown as follows:

Part 1 – General Principle & perspective of QFD Method

Part 2 – Acquisition of Non-quantitative VOC or VOS

Part 3 – Acquisition of Quantitative VOC or VOS

Part 4 – Analysis of Non-Quantitative & Quantitative VOC/VOS

Part 5 – Solution Strategy

Part 6 – Optimization – Robust Parameter Design

Part 7 – Optimization – Tolerance Design & Output to Manufacturing

Part 8 – Guidelines for Commercialization & Life Cycle

Then she brief QFD – Quality Function Deployment that was a method to assure customer or stakeholder satisfaction and value with new and existing products by designing in, from different levels and different perspectives the requirements that are most important to the customer or stakeholders.

The word “Function” had separated into “Quality Function” and “Product Function”. And there were two types of “Deployment” that one was Extraction (Pull out the embedded items or a particular aspect & organize the pulled out items systematically) and the other was Conversion (Translate items of one aspect into items of another aspect).

Extraction to Conversion = Voice of Customer → Demanded Qualities → Quality Elements

However, the House of Quality ranking was not mathematically operated and it was suggested to employ Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for improving the calculation.

Finally, Dr. Catherine Chan briefed the Theory & Principles of QFD below.

i) Prioritize information to focus

ii) Understand how to cause good quality

iii) Listen to the Voice of the Customer

iv) Observe the customer’s situation

v) Capture information from other sources

vi) Improve internal communication through the transformation of information between perspectives