Press Releases
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Expert Choice, Glenn Mazur Partner for QFD
January 29th, 2004
Expert Choice announced today that it has entered into a strategic alliance with Glenn Mazur, President of Japan Business Consultants (JBC), Ltd., and Executive Director of the Quality Function Deployment Institute (QFDI). Mazur and colleagues will use Expert Choice’s tools in support of their Quality Function Deployment (QFD) consulting and training practice.
QFD is a system for assuring customer satisfaction by efficiently delivering value to customers. Through implementation of the QFD methodology, a company can identify and prioritize customers, discover stated and unstated customer needs, align technical requirements to customer needs, and deliver top value through a coherent development process.
Speaking about the new alliance, Mazur noted "Expert Choice is uniquely applicable to prioritizing customer needs because it uses a sound mathematical process (the Analytic Hierarchy Process) using paired comparisons to generate ratio scale priorities - the only kind that can be deployed in QFD matrices.” Mazur added, “The founder of QFD, Dr. Yoji Akao, recognized as early as the 1980s that the Analytic Hierarchy Process could play a key role in understanding customer priorities.”
Echoing Mazur’s comments, Rich Dougherty, CEO for Expert Choice, commented “We are happy to more tightly align with Glenn and the rest of the QFD community. QFD is a powerful methodology that helps companies ensure their new products and services are aligned with their customer’s objectives; it also improves the overall value in an organization’s new product development portfolio.”
Expert Choice’s tools include Expert Choice for Groups™, a collaborative decision support engine that Japan Business Consultants uses in their QFD consulting practice, and the Expert Choice Resource Aligner™, an advanced optimization platform for project portfolio alignment and ROI determinations.
About Glenn Mazur, Japan Business Consultants, Ltd. Glenn H. Mazur has been active in QFD since its inception in North America, and has worked extensively with the founders of QFD on their teaching and consulting visits from Japan. He is a leader in the application of QFD to service industries and consumer products, conducts advanced QFD research, and is the Conference Chair for the annual North American Symposium on Quality Function Deployment. Glenn is the Executive Director of the QFD Institute and International Council for QFD, retired Adjunct Lecturer on TQM at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, President of Japan Business Consultants, Ltd., and is a senior member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the Japanese Society for Quality Control (JSQC). He is a certified QFD Red Belt® (highest level), one of two in North America. Additional papers and related topics may be found at http://www.mazur.net.
About Expert Choice, Inc. More information about Expert Choice, Inc. can be found at the company’s website, expertchoice.com, or by contacting Jim Devlin at jdevlin@expertchoice.com
top of page