Survey and Research Data

The results of a survey of 450 US CEO's conducted by IBM Business Consulting Services suggested a need for more focus on customer information and that organisations responding quickly to a dynamic marketplace gained an advantage over up to 90% of the rest of the market players. Most CEO's surveyed said they would be focusing on increasing customer input into the development of new and better products. Other findings:

• Over 60% of CEO's said they needed to be better at capturing and understanding customer information in order to make swift business decisions

• Just under 60% reported the importance of responding to customer dynamics in real time;

• Over 50% predicted there would be greater customisation of products by specific customer segments;

• Whilst CEO's rated their ability to quickly adapt to external forces was the most important challenge they faced, only 13% rated their organisations as good at responding to changing business conditions, and only 10% reported that their organisations were good at responding to external forces. (Cited in Crawford-Cook & Applin, 2004). In a 1997 'Best Practice' survey which involved some 1400 New Zealand companies, results indicated a significant desire to obtain qualitative customer knowledge i.e.:

• 95% of senior managers had visited key customers; and

• 60% of senior managers had visited key customers at least every 3 months. (Knuckey et al, 1999) In relation to Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a US study received responses from 80 QFD project team leaders, or members, from 40 US companies (mostly manufacturing and mostly on the Fortune 500 list), and service and government organisations. Results from this study included:

• Overall product design: Respondents strongly felt that QFD delivered a better result than their previous approach. QFD had created an information intensive climate with the free exchange of ideas and communication. This had positively impacted on the development of product concepts and the devising of designs to meet customer quality and performance objectives;

• Customer satisfaction: Respondents agreed that when applied to product development QFD resulted in higher levels of customer satisfaction than from other approaches used. Respondents reported that developing a good product concept and meeting customer attributes, functional objectives, and quality objectives were positively correlated with customer satisfaction;

• Product development: Survey responses indicated that QFD offered product development teams opportunities to achieve significant improvements over traditional product development practices;

• Overall, the results showed that QFD simplified the manufacturing process. (Vonderembse, & Raghunathan, 1997)

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