CEAT Ltd. of India became the first non-Japanese tire company to win the prestigious Deming Prize for business transformation by implementing Total Quality Management (TQM).
This nine-year effort has brought tremendous benefits not only to their products, but to their employees and their local communities. Instrumental to their journey was their QFD Green Belt® training taught by the QFD Institute.
Anant Goenka, Managing Director of CEAT Ltd. commented:
"We are delighted and honored to receive the Deming Prize. It's a significant milestone and testimony in our journey of quality and customer-centricity. All activities and processes are geared towards enhancing customer satisfaction and we are working hard to enhance these processes. Quality is also about living our purpose which is 'Making Mobility Safer and Smarter Everyday'. The journey continues, every day."
Achieving this customer-centricity was attributed, in part, to QFD Institute training. Said Shekhar Ajgaonkar, Senior Vice President of TQM:
"You have been very instrumental in building the fundamental understanding on customer insighting and Blitz QFD® and inspiring our people especially in marketing and R&D for working on product development in a TQM way, which enabled our people to become more customer centric.
"Our customer Insight, QFD and Product Development process played a very important part in achieving our strategy and also appreciated by the Deming Prize examiners. As we look back on our journey we can cherish the great new initiatives we began, which provided momentum to continue on this path year over year."
CEAT Ltd. had also recently been ranked first in India for OE Tyre Customer Satisfaction, by the J.D. Power 2017 India Original Equipment Tyre Customer Satisfaction Index (TCSI) study released in March 2017.
Blitz QFD® aligns both the marketing and engineering functions to seek out opportunities to beat the competition where it matters most to the customer. Beyond the confines of traditional quality thinking that looks for the "minimally viable product" or MVP, Blitz QFD® looks for the "minimally merchandisable product" or MMP, that customer want to buy because it solves their most important problem, enables an important opportunity, or enhances their image to themselves or others.
Followers of the Blitz QFD® approach know that limited project schedule and budget is better spent in the gemba (the customer's world) collecting evidence by listening to and observing customer problems and opportunities, than in completing big House of Quality matrices in order to figure out which 1% of product requirements on which to focus.
While classical QFD assumes clear and precise customer needs have been thrown over the wall by marketing to engineering, modern Blitz QFD® recognizes that in today's global market, competitors who get closer to the customer have a real and distinct advantage in both time-to-market and in product features. In fact, even if a comprehensive House of Quality is required, preceding it with a Blitz QFD® study will make the House that much stronger, and no wasted effort. (We discussed these differences with case study examples, in the newsletter “Classical, Blitz, or Reverse QFD - Which one for my project?”
Congratulations to CEAT Ltd. QFD teams, and kudos to the top management who courageously embraced the new quality initiatives and supported their employees throughout the journey.
For more on modern tools of Blitz QFD®, please contact us.