Customer-Centric Design (Best on Quality)

This book presents a cutting-edge customer-centric design approach, equipping readers with specific tools to effectively analyze customer needs and develop top-tier designs while taking pricing and competition into account. The meticulously chosen tools, rigorously tested by the authors, are derived from Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a proven method with a 50-year track record of successful implementation across various industry sectors.

Customer-Centric Design: Based on QFD Principles introduces a contemporary guide to the design principles of Blitz QFD®, a groundbreaking methodology developed by the QFD Institute over 25 years back. This book is crafted to optimize customer processes, leading to heightened success and increased business opportunities. By tackling customer concerns and concentrating on top-line revenue growth through the sale of high-value goods and services, the book offers a strategic approach to business development. Additionally, it focuses on the fundamentals of QFD prioritization, including the analytic hierarchy process, enabling more precise measurement of customer priorities and critical design decisions. Moreover, the book is compliant with the new ISO 16355 for QFD standard, ensuring that it aligns with the latest industry requirements. Relevant references will also be provided for further exploration.

Product managers, engineers, and technologists will find this book particularly valuable, as it offers user-friendly methods and tools for validating marketing requirements and conducting market studies independently, as well as strategies to efficiently use these tools within tight time constraints.

David Menichelli received his PhD from the University of Florence in 2002, where he worked as a researcher in applied physics and adjunct professor of physics till 2009. Since 2010 he has been with IBA Dosimetry, where he covered several roles in R&D, product management, and program management. In 2015 he received the QFD Master Black Belt® from QFD Institute and is an expert resource for the development of ISO 16355-9. Since then, he has investigated and put into practice methods to design products based on customer-centric principles. He is the author of more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers and the inventor of six international patents.

Glenn H. Mazur has been active in QFD since its inception in North America and has worked extensively with the founders of QFD on their teaching and consulting visits from Japan. He is a leader in the application of QFD as well as conducting advanced QFD research and is the Chair of the International Symposium on Quality Function Deployment. Glenn is the Executive Director of the QFD Institute and International Council for QFD and retired Adjunct Lecturer on TQM at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, and a retired senior member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and the Japanese Society for Quality Control (JSQC). He is a certified QFD Red Belt® (highest level), one of two in North America. He is a certified QFD-Architekt #A21907 by QFD Institute Deutschland. He is the honorary president of the Hong Kong QFD Association and Asia QFD Association. He is the convenor of the ISO Working Group which has written the ISO 16355 series standards for QFD, a member of TC69/SC7 writing the ISO 20575 standard for Design for Six Sigma, and a liaison to TC 312 writing the ISO/TS 23686 standard for Service Excellence and TC 207 for Environmental Management. He is an Academician of the International Academy for Quality. He is the recipient of the 1998 Akao Prize® for Excellence.