by Kenneth Crow
DRM Associates

Use by University Learning Institute explicitly granted.

1. Organize customer needs in the Product Planning Matrix. Group under logical categories as determined with affinity diagramming.
   
   Establish critical internal customer needs or management control requirements; industry, national or international standards; and regulatory requirements. If standards or regulatory requirements are commonly understood, they should not be included in order to minimize the information that needs to be addressed.
   
   State customer priorities. Use a 1 to 5 rating. Critical internal customer needs or management control requirements; industry, national or international standards; and regulatory requirements, if important enough to include, are normally given a rating of "3".
   
   Develop competitive evaluation of current company products and competitive products. Use surveys, customer meetings or focus groups/clinics to obtain feedback. Rate the company's and the competitor's products on a 1 to 5 scale with "5" indicating that the product fully satisfies the customer's needs. Include competitor's customer input to get a balanced perspective.
   
   Review the competitive evaluation strengths and weaknesses relative to the customer priorities. Determine the improvement goals and the general strategy for responding to each customer need. The Improvement Factor is "1" if there are no planned improvements to the competitive evaluation level. Add a factor of .1 for every planned step of improvement in the competitive rating, (e.g., a planned improvement of goiung from a rating of "2" to "4" would result in an improvement factor of "1.2". Identify warranty, service, or reliability problems & customer complaints to help identify areas of improvement.
   
   Identify the sales points that Marketing will emphasize in its message about the product. There should be no more than three major or primary sales points or two major sales points and two minor or secondary sales points in order to keep the Marketing message focused. Major sales points are assigned a weighting factor of 1.3 and minor sales points are assigned a weighting factor of 1.1.
   
   The process of setting improvement goals and sales points implicitly develops a product strategy. Formally describe that strategy in a narrative form. What is to be emphasized with the new product? What are its competitive strengths? What will distinguish it in the marketplace? How will it be positioned relative to other products? In other words, describe the value proposition behind this product. The key is to focus development resources on those areas that will provide the greatest value to the customer. This strategy brief is typically one page and is used to gain initial focus within the team as well as communicate and gain concurrence from management.
   
   Establish product requirements or technical characteristics to respond to customer needs and organize into logical categories. Categories may be related to functional aspects of the products or may be grouped by the likely subsystems to primarily address that characteristic. Characteristics should be meaningful (actionable by Engineering), measurable, practical (can be determined without extensive data collection or testing) and global. By being global, characteristics should be stated in a way to avoid implying a particular technical solution so as not to constrain designers. This will allow a wide range of alternatives to be considered in an effort to better meet customer needs. Identify the direction of the objective for each characteristic (target value or range, maximize or minimize).
   
   Develop relationships between customer needs and product requirements or technical characteristics. These relationships define the degree to which as product requirement or technical characteristic satisfies the customer need. It does NOT show a potential negative impact on meeting a customer need - this will be addressed later in the interaction matrix. Consider the goal associated with the characteristic in determining whether the characteristic satisfies the customer need. Use weights (we recommend using 5-3-1 weighting factors) to indicate the strength of the relationship - strong, medium and weak. Be sparing with the strong relationships to discriminate the really strong relationships.
   
   Perform a technical evaluation of current products and competitive products. Sources of information include: competitor websites, industry publications, customer interviews, published specifications, catalogs and brochures, trade shows, purchasing and benchmarking competitor’s products, patent information, articles and technical papers, published benchmarks, third-party service & support organizations, and former employees. Perform this evaluation based on the defined product requirements or technical characteristics. Obtain other relevant data such as warranty or service repair occurrences and costs.
   
   Develop preliminary target values for product requirements or technical characteristics. Consider data gathered during the technical evaluation in setting target values. Do not get too aggressive with target values in areas that are not determined to be the primary area of focus with this development effort.
   
   Determine potential positive and negative interactions between product requirements or technical characteristics using symbols for strong or medium, positive or negative relationships. Too many positive interactions suggest potential redundancy in product requirements or technical characteristics. Focus on negative interactions - consider product concepts or technology to overcome these potential trade-offs or consider the trade-off's in establishing target values.
   
   Calculate importance ratings. Multiply the customer priority rating by the improvement factor, the sales point factor and the weighting factor associated with the relationship in each box of the matrix and add the resulting products in each column.
   
   Identify a difficulty rating (1 to 5 point scale, five being very difficult and risky) for each product requirement or technical characteristic. Consider technology maturity, personnel technical qualifications, resource availability, technical risk, manufacturing capability, supply chain capability, and schedule. Develop a composite rating or breakdown into individual assessments by category.
   
   Analyze the matrix and finalize the product plan. Determine required actions and areas of focus.
   
   Finalize target values. Consider the product strategy objectives, importance of the various technical characteristics, the trade-offs that need to be made based on the interaction matrix, the technical difficulty ratings, and technology solutions and maturity.
   
   
2. Maintain the matrix as customer needs or conditions change.