CTQ Spells Customer Satisfaction

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Whether we're talking about products or services, we can define customer
satisfaction in the same basic terms. Customers want their purchases to be
free of defects, affordable, and on time. We can refer to these three categories of
requirements as being critical to satisfaction (CTS), as Figure 1 shows.
Fig. 1 CTS Characteristics
CTS =Critical to Quality (CTQ) Defect-free
=Critical to Cost (CTC) Affordable
= Critical to Delivery (CTD) On time
When it comes to price and speed of delivery, it's usually easy for
customers to express their specific needs in terms your organization will
understand. There may be some disagreement about where to draw the line
between acceptable and unacceptable performance, but customer expectations
can at least be quantified. Customers can tell you how much they will pay for a
product or service. They can state how long they are willing to wait. You can also
know exactly how close you come to meeting their expectations.
Customer requirements in terms of quality are not as easily translated into
measurable and shareable terms. Customers may know what they want, but
they often cannot communicate their requirements in readily usable ways.
In fact, even the notion of measuring quality by counting defects is
antithetical to customer behavior. You may need to evaluate your own
process capabilities and defect rates for an entire product or service range, but
from a customer perspective, a purchase is either defective or it isn’t.
Then there is the challenge—and this applies to time and cost, as well as
quality—of balancing what customers want with what is practical and feasible.
Knowing which requirements are most critical from a customer perspective is
essential if you have to make tradeoffs or sacrifice one requirement to meet
another. Black Belts and their teams therefore make identifying critical to quality
characteristics a priority in the early stages of their Six Sigma projects.
2
How Do Black Belts Identify CTQs?
Two tools that Black Belts typically use to identify customer CTQs are quality
function deployment (QFD) and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA).
· QFD: In a QFD analysis, Black Belts and their teams translate your customer
information and market research into usable criteria for developing or
improving a product or process design. Teams outline customer requirements
and technical requirements for a particular design and map the relationships
between them. They then rate the strength of those relationships to determine
which characteristics are most critical to quality.
· FMEA: An FMEA involves identifying potential customer dissatisfiers with the
goal of eliminating them from the design. FMEAs are most effective when
employed up front in the design process, not after the fact. Teams look for all
possible ways (modes) a process may fail and identify the effects of those
modes. They then determine the criticality of all modes and effects, assigning
ratings to indicate where correction is most urgent.
Six Sigma's customer focus dictates that the most valuable projects attack
those improvement opportunities most important to customer satisfaction.
In other words, Six Sigma projects must aim to reduce defects, decrease
customer costs, or speed up cycle time.
Many organizations already have the customer data that Black Belts need to
target specific opportunities and develop effective solutions to improve price,
delivery, and quality. Often, it is simply a matter of using the right statistical tools
to translate the language of the customer into measurable quantities.