Collaborate With Customers Design for Mass Customization Design for Manufacture Design for Quality & Reliability Implement Fast Time-to-Market Techniques Collaborate with Suppliers in Development

• Get the customer intimately involved at the inception
• Formalize translation of his needs to engineering language and resolve any disconnects promptly
• Confirm by continuing customer involvement throughout the project

• Get concept from within the company or from the customer
• Design the product to completion with little customer involvement

• Designs real-world customer requirements into the product
• Provides process to focus technology and innovation on issues that are important in the marketplace
• Yields customer ownership of the process and the product
• Results in faster time-to-market
• Eliminates design changes late in the design process when they are very expensive - Gets it right the first time!
• Gives more functionality at lower cost

"And where along the value chain do you want to mass-customize - in design, manufacture, sales, service? Be selective: a good rule of thumb is to mass-customize as much as necessary and as little as possible." - Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization, Gilmore and Pine

"At the heart of their (computer companies) remarkable advance is modularity-building a complex product or process from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole. Through the widespread adoption of modular designs, the computer industry has dramatically increased its rate of innovation. Indeed, it is modularity, more than speedy processing and communication or any other technology, that is responsible for the heightened pace of change that managers in the computer industry now face. And strategies based on modularity are the best way to deal with that change." - Managing in an Age of Modularity, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, Harvard Business Review, Sept-Oct 1997

"With QFD, introduction costs decrease and market share grows because of satisfied customers who have a product that meets or exceeds their needs and desires." - Step-By-Step QFD: Customer-Driven Product Design, by John Terninko