1、David Allen, PE is Principal of Allen Consulting, LLC, a Boston engineering firm providing leadership in design, commissioning this practice helps teams transform that knowledge into measurable performance criteria they can commit to and focus on for success. Citing case histories of the application
2、 of state-of-the-art customer-focused needs gathering and “product development” methods, this paper will reveal how the building industry can transform itself into a high performance, customer-focused team. INTRODUCTION In order to meet the lofty goals of zero energy consumption and creating high-pe
3、rformance buildings, industry leaders need to rethink the way they conceive and build structures and environments. With increasing international competition and supply chains, the building industry is currently facing a scenario that the US manufacturing industry faced in the late 1970s and 1980s. T
4、o meet those competitive challenges, manufacturers of cars, computers, and consumer goods adopted new and improved product development methods. These methods have profoundly altered the way competitive companies conceive, design, build and deliver high quality products. This paper will address how t
5、he best companies in the product development world include customers in their product development process to ensure that a product delivers what they want and need. Well cite examples of how developers of the best performing buildings are doing this, and share insights in how you can work together t
6、o accomplish great results with future building projects, making high performance the norm. We will show how to organize product development projects to make best use of the “customer-needs-first” techniques and how this approach requires working differently to achieve high-performing results. Final
7、ly, we will suggest specific actions you can take to get started with this approach to make your buildings standard-setting examples of high performance: delivering what customers need to excel at their work while using little or no energy. LV-11-C027222 ASHRAE Transactions2011. American Society of
8、Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Inc. (www.ashrae.org). Published in ASHRAE Transactions, Volume 117, Part 1. For personal use only. Additional reproduction, distribution, or transmission in either print or digital form is not permitted without ASHRAES prior written permission.
9、THE VALUE OF CUSTOMER FOCUS Customer-focused development methods are not new. Over the years, we have seen the evolution of Customer Relationship Management, a method of managing customer “touch points” to build loyalty among existing buyers of current products. We see “customer focus” in many corpo
10、rate mission statements and CEO visions. Another variation of customer focus, which is the topic of this paper, involves understanding customer needs when they use a product or service and proactively incorporating that information into the product development process. Understanding customer needs h
11、as evolved steadily as a best practice in the product development profession since the early 1980s. Many variations of processes for understanding customer needs has evolved over the years, but Tony Ulwicks book, What Customers Want1, describes the seminal best practice in this field. A brief histor
12、y of this evolution will highlight key aspects of how this methodology can serve the Building Industry. Who is the customer of the building industry? Building customers are the people who come into commercial and industrial buildings everyday to do their jobs, and the people who own the businesses t
13、hat hope to profit from the work they do. To deliver a high performance building it must be clear to those designing the building what high performance means to the building owners, occupants and to those who maintain it. The architects, engineers and contractors must know what these customers want
14、to experience to best do their work, from how the air smells to the size of the checks they write for utility bills. Understanding these needs is essential for creating a building that is effective, efficient for users and profitable for its owners. Todays top product developers use tried and true m
15、ethods to collect this sort of information and use it to make sound decisions. The building industry has not typically employed such methods, yet it is critically important for high performing buildings. In the words of Yogi Berra, “If you dont know where youre going, youll end up someplace else.” S
16、etting the expectations for how a building will perform takes only a few weeks, but locks in how the building will perform for the next 50 or more years. Unfortunately, the building industry does not typically do this well, and the result is mediocre performance in many buildings from the perspectiv
17、e of all customers. Lessons from the Total Quality Movement, 1980s and 1990s. The story of how these customer-focused product development methods came into practice started with off shore competition. After the 1973 oil crisis, Japanese auto manufacturers caught the US auto industry by surprise when
18、 they introduced low cost, high fuel efficiency vehicles to a demanding US public. Initially dismissed as low quality alternatives, the US automakers were slow to respond and the Japanese gained a foothold. Year after year, the quality of these foreign vehicles improved to satisfy key US drivers nee
19、ds: better reliability, more convenient use of space, better styling, even cup holders! Their market share grew quickly. The US auto industry captains dispatched study groups to Japan to find out how the Japanese were doing it. They discovered that the Japanese were using “quality improvement method
20、s” in their product development processes that they learned from American industry icons, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, among others1. The concept of continuous improvement (CI) of processes emerged as the path to follow for improved product quality. To this day in Japan, an annual Deming Award2is bestowed
21、 upon companies that best use Demings teachings. A key part of CI is to know where best to improve a process or product. To do this, the Japanese developed a methodology to focus on the “qualities demanded by customers.” The rather arcane name attributed to this process translated into English as Qu
22、ality Function Deployment3, or QFD. The QFD process uses a technique to gather and understand what these “customer demands” are in any market, a process called gathering the Voice of the Customer (VOC). The whole idea behind this approach is to make sure that each person in the development organizat
23、ion understands which of the customer demands are most important and least satisfied by current products so that “quality improvement efforts can be managed.” This is no easy task in a complex manufacturing organization, and it is no easier within a typical building project organization. Imagine the
24、 number of people that must gain alignment on this. How can these customer insights best be “deployed” into an organization effectively and efficiently so that everyone does their part to improve quality. Dr. Akaos 1 Ulwick, Anthony, 2005. What Customers Want, Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Crea
25、te Breakthrough Products and Services, McGraw-Hill. 2011 ASHRAE 223system does just that! To make the system work more efficiently and effectively, the Japanese incorporated the teachings of another American industry “quality guru” Joseph Juran.4In the day, Jurans teachings focused on the “soft” sid
26、e of quality addressing how people work together and making them more able to share information effectively, removing the organizational barriers and constraints (known as functional silos). Team Building became an integral part of “making quality happen.” Jurans work also emphasized how quality tra
27、nslated into bottom-line business costs and profit. Taken as a whole, the overall system became known as Total Quality Management (TQM)5. The evolution from TQM to the Six Sigma Movements. The forces of global competition continued aggressively in the ensuing decades. As more companies in the US beg
28、an to adopt emerging product quality improvement methods, products improved, the “quality bar” was raised in almost every market, from automobiles and semi-conductors, to consumer products and services. In many industries, adopting these practices became the price of admission to play in the game as
29、 evidenced by the emergence of ISO standards6. TQM practices have gone through several evolutionary improvements since the 80s. Most notable was the practice of “re-engineering” in which improvement methods identified and removed waste in an entire organization. Unfortunately, these methods became i
30、nfamous proxies for carrying out reductions in workforces known as downsizing, as business leaders began to realize the inefficiencies in their existing business practices and organizations. Another giant step up the evolutionary ladder for TQM started in 1995 when Jack Welch implemented Six Sigma a
31、cross the entire GE Corporation7. Six Sigma, as the name implies, takes continuous improvement to a “defect-reduction” level of 6/1,000,000 chances or less, a lofty quality improvement goal. Interestingly, when Six Sigma is applied to every business process in an organization, as done by GE, amazing
32、 corporate financial results can be attained. Dr. Deming would be proud. Applying Six Sigma thinking to Innovation. Commensurate with the adoption of TQM and Six Sigma across global companies, Tony Ulwick8began applying this thinking to the process of developing new products, improving the front-end
33、 of Dr. Akaos system. The result was a process known today as Outcome-Driven Innovationor ODI, a process that yields 80% success rates9. Companies around the world are beginning to adopt these new, improved methods to stay competitive in their respective markets and grow through innovation. What doe
34、s this process look like and what makes it such an improvement over earlier customer-focused methods? Staying true to the principles of Six Sigma and TQM, the process is replicable and predictive of success. What makes this process revolutionary is that it is built around the simple notion that peop
35、le buy products to get a job done. It dissects customers jobs into the steps needed to accomplish the job and gathers from the customers their measures of success in achieving each step! These are the true customer needs. This methodology has some rather straightforward steps: 1. Identify the custom
36、ers for any project 2. Understand the jobs they want to get done 3. Identify the steps the customers are trying to accomplish to get a job done 4. Uncover the customers measures of success in achieving each of these steps in the job 5. Prioritize the needs based on their importance and current level
37、 of satisfaction (opportunity) 6. Determine which of these needs are not satisfied by solutions available today 7. Organize the design/development team to take specific actions to create the new solutions needed to address those high opportunity needs The results of a typical “customer needs study”
38、reveals an opportunity landscape that a team can use to focus their development efforts: 224 ASHRAE TransactionsFigure 1 Customer Need Opportunity Landscape. Each dot on the landscape represents a customer need. The ones on the right are more important for value creation than the ones in the middle,
39、 and the ones on the left are opportunities for cost reduction, a handy set of data for any development team to have who are trying to make tough tradeoff decisions in a development project! This thinking for product innovation fits perfectly in creating the basis for building innovation and design.
40、 Improving the “job” that customers are trying to get done is straightforward and logical when considering all the customers of a new building project and all their needs; that is, mapping the needs of the building owners, maintainers as well as those expected to use the facility. Dissecting the cus
41、tomer job10as a series of steps and understanding how the customer defines the value they are trying to achieve in each step11, and then conducting quantitative analysis of all the needs, pinpoints what customers value most thus revealing a prioritization of all the needs. These data are the precise
42、 inputs needed for teams to make sensible early tradeoff decisions necessary to create new, improved products and services (building environments). For example: easy access to equipment is important to maintain high performance, however providing it may be at odds with usable floor space or building
43、 aesthetics. Identifying these problems early can avoid more costly issues during construction. Knowing these tradeoffs during the design phase also provides the team with the opportunity to find innovative new designs or solutions to this problem of providing easy access without giving up usable fl
44、oor space or building aesthetics. With a prioritized list of criteria, teams can achieve innovation in a proactive and predictable way12. Successes have already been achieved in the building industry, focusing on the jobs that customers in specific contexts are trying to get done. Whether its buildi
45、ng owners, architects, engineers a, contractors or occupants of the building trying to get their daily jobs done, ODI provides a way for the entire development team to focus on the most important needs in designing, constructing, maintaining and using a higher performance building. Case studies. Tho
46、ugh detailed case studies of the building industry applications of ODI remain unpublished at this writing and information is scarce on other approaches, significant improvements and benefits have been realized by those applying the methods; often cited are the benefits related to the focus and organ
47、izational alignment that the process provides: 1. Application in building code design and development: Project Description: a US organization charged with creating and maintaining building codes and standards. A team applied ODI to identify a code designers needs in the job of “designing a system to
48、 code.” Benefits realized to date: (1) Added new concept ideas generated to their development pipeline; incorporating insights gained as enhancements to existing code products. (2) Getting a broad cross-functional group to work together on developing product concepts that meet customer needs, a firs
49、t. ODI got them all speaking the same language and understanding product concepts in the same way; excellent way to educate people on customer focus first! 2. Application to discover opportunities for GREEN products: Project Description: an association of product companies SatisfactionImportanceOpp 15ExtremeOpportunity Opp 10Solid OpportunityOpp 12High OpportunityUnder-ServedAppropriately ServedLimitedOpportunity1234567891012345678910Table StakesOver-ServedOpportunity = Importance + max (Importance Satisfaction, 0)Ripe for DisruptionPotential for DisruptionValu
