3 DESIGN THE NEW EVALED™ RV N 3 THROUGH THE QFD METHOD 3.1 Why the QFD

The evaporators for the water treatment are highly technological products with a niche market. In fact the overall number of evaporators that the world market can require per year is no more than few thousands, and the context is the one in which emotionally or self fulfilling purchases are missing or reduced to the minimum.

Consequently, the challenge of Veolia Water Technologies Italia was to develop a new type of evaporator that can maintain its technological leadership on the market, and at the same time offer to the clients something new that can greatly change their approach to how an evaporator can facilitate and improve their activities.

The Application of the QFD Method to Design a New Type of Evaporator

Therefore, the new project must have the chance to embody, from the very first steps, the requests of the market and the actual needs of the clients (even the needs that they have not recognized by themselves yet): its aim has to be the realization of an innovative product that satisfies the expectations of the market even in an unexpected way.

The management of the company wants to seize the opportunity to change dramatically the process to conceive and design a new product, with the purpose of innovate it and trace new rules on the market of the evaporators, in a way that can greatly improve the expectations of the clients to what an evaporator has to be.

A great part of the quality expressed by a product or service is due to the product’s definition and the design process. Every product or service can be considered like a complex system of entities, such as clients, users and stakeholders, and their mutual relations, each one potentially very important in terms of contribution to the overall quality of the product.

At the first place, in terms of importance, can be placed the customer, but every human involved in the product life is a potential driver for product quality and innovation.

That is the reason why it is so important to apply a methodology able to take into account all the needs and variables belonging to the many stakeholders involved in the product definition, starting from the internal team, and including the organization, the society, and obviously, the customers.

One of the most appropriate methods to reach this goal is the Quality activities in a way that could damage the business. Therefore, the choice of the top management was to ask for support to a senior consultant already expert in the sector and in industrial design. Such support was given by professor Giuseppe Mincolelli and the design consultancy company Lineaguida S.r.l.

3.2 A new way of designing

The first step of the introduction of this new process was to create a multidisciplinary team of nine experts, representing all the competencies and the skills involved in the project. Thus, the team covers nearly all the departments into the company, and in particular:

 Engineering

 Purchasing

 Chemical process evaluation

 Sales

 Production

 Service and after-sales

 Quality and safety

Nonetheless, working in team with people with different languages, skills and points of view is not an automatic mechanism and it takes time to create a good and positive ‘climate’ in order to see some results. Prof. Giuseppe Mincolelli and Lineaguida team operated as mentors and ‘boosters’ to facilitate this process and keep each department aware about the direction and progresses of the project.

The first innovation introduced to the design process has been not to follow the traditional function-based approach (from the marketing idea to the production), but keep all the participants continuously involved in the evolution of the project, even if with different engagement along the different phases.

As fig. 4 shows, every functional department is in fact seamlessly involved in every phase of the design process, with different intensity according to the opportunity.

Figure 4: The new approach.

3.3 System layout and project analysis

As remarked in section 2.2, the EVALED™ RV N has been chosen as the series to which apply the QFD method because of its importance within the

The Application of the QFD Method to Design a New Type of Evaporator

product range, and also because the prototype already built up of a N 3 version was designed with a traditional approach and it did not match all the performances expected. Thus, the challenge has become to redesign this product with the aim to strongly improve its quality in terms of what make the difference in the client’s choice.

To obtain this result, the team started to draw a simple system layout to visualize a first picture of the complex environment, in terms of stakeholders and their relations (fluxes, hierarchies, etc.) within which the product has intended to ‘live’ (fig. 5).

Figure 5: The external system layout.

The next step was to draw the unit system lay out, which means to ideally divide the product into sections in order to better clarify its functions and features. Afterwards, all the defined functions and characteristics have been classified either as a project invariant (something that is out of the perimeter of action of the project, such as the available technologies, the general context of the company, the social environment, etc.) or as a project variable (something that can be changed or questioned to find alternatives or different solutions). An example of the unit system lay out of the RV N 3 unit is shown in fig. 6.

Figure 6: The unit system layout.

3.4 Clients and needs

The core of the QFD activity, from which all the other actions will start, is to identify every stakeholder involved in the overall project, even the ones not usually considered as interested in conceiving the product (e.g. the workers of the assembly department).

After the identification of all stakeholders, they have been classified as internal clients (for example, in the RV N 3 case, the internal operators that have to deal with this product such as blue collars, service technicians, sales managers, etc.) or external clients (buyers, people in charge of transportation, functioning, maintenance, the waste water treatment plant chief, and so on).

The result of this step was a list of sentences expressed with the same words that could be used by the considered people in order to be as much as possible close to the clients’ goals and to avoid their frustrations. Here below there are some examples of this list of sentences:

 Client’s goals:

o ‘I want to control the unit from a remote site.’

o ‘I don’t want to become dirty when I clean the unit.’

o ‘I don’t want to pay too much the electricity for the running of the unit.’

o ‘I need that the unit has to be reliable.’

o ‘I want to reach a clean water for discharging it.’

o ‘I need a good pay-back of the investment.’

The Application of the QFD Method to Design a New Type of Evaporator

 Client’s possible frustrations:

o ‘I have not enough instructions for the maintenance.’

o ‘I’m having unexpected costs and expenses.’

o ‘I can’t easily move and transport the unit.’

o ‘The spare parts are always available too late.’

o ‘The requested maintenance tools aren’t easy to find.’

To have a scientific and objective result of this activity, each identified requirement has been ranked in relation to the following indicators:

 Relative weight of the need

 Absolute weight of the need

 Strengths of the new model

 Way to satisfied the need in the current model (RV N 3 prototype)

 Way to satisfied the need in the new model (RV N 3 new version)

 Degree of improvement of the new model with respect to current model

Furthermore, the same list of needs was used to compare how the competitors already in the market satisfy these needs, in order to have a clear picture of the benchmarking context. The result was a complex matrix which however helped to prioritize the final list (fig. 7).

3.5 Technical requirements and features specifications

The last step of the work was to interrelate the characteristics defined for the new model with the needs highlighted in the previous part of the QFD method application.

Therefore, every characteristic has been associated to a quantitative size (expressed by a number) to assign a precise value to the expected

 Quantity of chemical products needed for the running

 Number of hours requested for the assembly

The team determined the quantitative value for each analyzed characteristics by taking into account the results of the applications of a QFD algorithm.

This algorithm creates a hierarchy of the characteristics, through computing its level of correlation with needs, the importance of needs, the performance benchmarking and other parameters related to marketing and brand values.

The final stage of the activity was the creation of a document containing detailed specifications about all the design aspects related to the unit (mechanical, thermo-hydraulic, chemical process, electrical, electronic, logistic, purchasing, components customization, treatment customization, assembling, interface, remote control, selling method, maintenance and after sales). These specifications are conceived to be usable by all the different developers and designers that will participate in the design process. The document so defined follows the same criteria of the methodology that has been applied for its creation, so it is organized in chapters, ordered according to the importance of needs: high, medium or low priority and, for each of them, submits a list of technical proposals and some considerations about the characteristics related to its satisfaction.