QFD and Kansei Engineering: Can they be integrated?

In Japan, Kansei Engineering is often considered as an independent product development philosophy, which typically is carried out in concurrent engineering processes. However, since the methodology is little known in European industry, is it possible to pinpoint possible entry points for Kansei Engineering into a company’s product development processes?

In practice this means may mean a way of identifying product development methods such as QFD etc., which are suitable for transferring  Kansei Engineering results into conventional product development.

Integrating Kansei Engineering Data in QFD

Many companies use standardised methods for the translation of customer wants and needs into product and process properties. One of the most common methods is QFD.

Kansei Engineering data can be used to identify customer needs and determine their importance, facilitating the setting of target values for technical data and perform benchmarking between different products and brands and quantify the relationships in the relationship matrix in a more exact way:

In the relationship matrix the customer’s needs are linked to the technical responses. The strength of the relationships is determined by more or less qualified guesses of experts distinguishing between strong, medium and weak relationships. Further refinement of the scale complicates the decision process and as a consequence increases the evaluation time.

However, in some cases more detailed information is desirable. Kansei Engineering can quantify those relationships by building mathematical models of the customer’s Kansei. Moreover, statistics allow examination of whether different customer group have different opinions which in turn and lead to the development of alternative product concepts.

In QFD the customer needs are collected using focus group interviews, activity analysis etc. The data gathered is evaluated and interpreted by i.e. Voice of customer tables, etc. Those tools try to grasp even implicit needs and wants and link them to product parameters.

However, interpreting the customers’ statements is very difficult and requires much experience. Kansei Engineering is designed for valuating the unconscious wants and needs, and delivers statistical mathematical values for the connection between a need and its technical response. Regarding furniture the customer may describe her home as ‘elegant’.

One way is to treat this statement with VOCT, and feed it into the ‘House of Quality’. An alternative way is to make a Kansei Engineering evaluation and get an exact translation into product properties with only minor influence from the researcher. In the following step within the QFD procedure, customer needs are ranked after their importance. QFD offers a number of different tools, based on (subjective) expert knowledge. Kansei Engineering offers the opportunity to collect the customer’s attitude about the particular importance of the different product properties.

Kansei Engineering can be used in the QFD process is the setting of the target values for the product properties. For every customer need, a number of product properties can be identified. Collecting additional information about what the ideal product should feel like, gives a clear indication about in which direction the Kansei Score of the certain Kansei Word has to be adjusted to suit the customers’ needs in a better way. Since it is known how and in which way the product properties are connected to the certain word, it becomes clear how the Kansei can e adjusted. As a result Kansei Engineering can help to set target values for the technical specifications.

Success in international markets does not only require a customer-focused design, but also knowledge about the competition situation in the specific market segment. QFD provides a product comparison where different products within the same segment are compared regarding the degree of fulfilment of a specific customer need. By comparing the results of Kansei Engineering studies made for different competing products, a benchmarking profile can be developed and integrated into the ‘House of Quality’. Such a combination of the House of Quality‘ and Kansei Engineering allows a special profiling of the products expressed Kansei.

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Beer and Statistics: William Sealy Gosset

What’s the link between beer and statistics? Ans: William Sealy Gosset

I recently visited the Guinness brewery whilst in Dublin to run the marathon for Cancer Research. Whilst there I happened across this plaque – check out the photograph above. It commemerated the life and work of William Sealy Gosset who was best known by his pen name Student and for his work on Student’s t-distribution.

It’s listed in Minitab as the paired t-test procedure is used to compare the mean difference between two populations when you believe that some dependency exists. Is a hypothesis test for the mean difference between paired observations that are related or dependent. The paired t-test is useful for analyzing differences between twins, differences in before-and-after measurements on the same subject, and differences between two treatments given to the same subject.

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Born in Canterbury, England to Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, Gosset attended Winchester College, the famous private school, before reading chemistry and mathematics at New College, Oxford. On graduating in 1899, he joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son.

Guinness was a progressive agro-chemical business and Gosset would apply his statistical knowledge both in the brewery and on the farm-to the selection of the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, trial and error and by spending two terms in 1906-7 in the biometric laboratory of Karl Pearson. Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship and Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers. Pearson helped with the 1908 papers but he had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer’s concern with small samples, while the biometrician typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods.

Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information. This meant that Gosset was unable to publish his works under his own name. He therefore used the pseudonym Student for his publications to avoid their detection by his employer. Thus his most famous achievement is now referred to as Student’s t-distribution, which might otherwise have been Gosset’s t-distribution.

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Gosset’s interest in barley cultivation led him to speculate that design of experiments should aim, not only at improving the average yield, but also at breeding varieties whose yield was insensitive (robust) to variation in soil and climate. This principle only occurs in the later thought of Fisher and then in the work of Genichi Taguchi in the 1950s.

In 1935, he left Dublin to take up the position of Head Brewer, in charge of the scientific side of production, at a new Guinness brewery at Park Royal in North West London. He died in Beaconsfield, England of a heart attack.

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The Secret Life of Minitab

Minitab offers many features that can save you time and effort when you’re learning statistics or analysing data. However, even long time users aren’t aware of the following short cuts, tools, and capabilities:

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

- Aaron Levenstein

Manipulating Data

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Need to change the format of a column? For example, do you need to convert a text column to numeric format for your analysis? Just choose Data > Change Data Type and select the appropriate option.

Re-Order?

Have you ever created a graph and wished you could switch the order of the results? For instance, you might want to change “High, Medium, Low” to “Low, Medium, High”. To display your results in a specific order, right-click on the column used to generate the output and choose Column > Value Order.

This lets you set the value order for a text column using an order you define. The value order lets you control the order of groups on bar charts and other graphs, as well as tables and other Session Window output.

Help

If you’ve never clicked on Minitab’s Help menu, you’re missing a tremendous collection of resources. Of course you’ll find guidance about how to use Minitab software there, including step-by-step tutorials.

In addition, you’ll also find:

• Minitab’s Statistical Glossary. This comprehensive, illustrated glossary covers all areas of Minitab statistics. Each definition contains practical, easy-to-understand information.
• StatGuideTM. You’ve run an analysis, but what does it mean? StatGuide explains how to interpret Minitab results, using preselected examples to explain your output.

A list of Methods and Formulas.

Links to helpful Internet resources, including their extensive Answers Knowledgebase.

And if you don’t find the answers you need, you can contact Minitab’s free Technical Support for assistance from highly skilled specialists with expertise in both computing and statistics.

Can You Repeat That?

Frequently, you’ll need to modify or rerun some part of an analysis you conducted. You can easily return to your last dialogue box by pressing CTRL+e. It’s also easy to recreate new graphs using different variables while retaining all of your graph edits. With a graph or control chart active, choose Editor > Make Similar Graph to make a graph that retains all properties of that graph but uses different columns.

Everything In Its Right Place

Minitab’s Project Manager allows you to navigate, view, and manipulate various parts of your project. Right-clicking either the folders or their contents lets you access a variety of menus that allow you to manage Session Window output, graphs, worksheets, command language, and related project areas.

You can also copy any or all analyses and graphs to Minitab’s built-in ReportPad to create reports and share your results with colleagues who may not have Minitab. You can move ReportPad contents to a more powerful word processing program for further editing and layout. Press CTRL+i to access Minitab’s Project Manager.

Change colour

To change the colour of bars and symbols on a graph, double-click on any bar or symbol. Then use the Attributes tab to change the fill pattern, colour, outline, and other aspects of how your graph appears.

Excel Importing Capability

To import data from Excel into Minitab, choose File > Open Worksheet, select Excel from Files of type and navigate to your Excel document. If you open a workbook with multiple sheets, each Excel sheet opens into a separate Minitab worksheet. You can also click Options and Preview to specify the data you want to import and to ensure that it is formatted properly. You can also import CSV, TXT and other data file formats using File > Open Worksheet.

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It’s Automatic

Minitab’s Autofill capability lets you automatically repeat the value in a cell (or cells), or follow a pattern as you click and drag down a column or columns in a worksheet. To repeat a value, select the cell, then hover your cursor on the lower right corner of the cell. When the cross appears, click and drag down the column to repeat the value in other cells. To repeat a pattern of values rather than a single value, press CTRL as you drag, following the same convention as in Excel. You can even use Autofill with custom lists. For example, with the worksheet active, choose Editor > Define Custom Lists to define “Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun” as a list, type one of the values in the first row of a column, and click and drag to fill in the list.

Customize menus and toolbars

To customize menus and toolbars to match your curriculum or regularly used statistical tools, choose Tools > Customize. You can add, delete, move, or edit menus and toolbars; add buttons to Minitab that you can simply click on to run macros; and set keystrokes for commands. Specify default settings using Tools > Options. Store all your personalized settings and customisation in a profile (using Tools > Manage Profiles).

What do you think? Leave your comments below:

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