PPT Slide
Weighing Aircraft Payoffs
The first step in executing the QFD process is to identify the opening set of objectives. For the FWV application the 1st set of objectives were the FWV Aircraft Payoffs. With the definitions for each Aircraft Payoff agreed to by the customer the second QFD step could be entertained, assigning a priority to each Aircraft Payoff.
One approach would be to treat each Aircraft Payoff equally. When this proposition was offered to the customer at the 4-5 Aug 97 customer / Boeing STL meeting you can see by the array of scores that no one valued the Aircraft Payoffs equally.
Six voices were solicited privately, then presented publicly for the remainder of the group to see. What quickly became obvious was the overwhelming dominance the two affordabilty payoffs enjoyed compared to the remaining seven performance payoffs. The group easily agreed that the two affordability payoffs should consume 50 of the 100 available points. Building consensus on the remaining seven performance payoffs required more time but essentially the seven were broken into two groups. Lethality, Range, Susceptibly and Readiness were valued roughly twice as much as Payload, Vulnerability and Take Off Gross Weight.
It is significant that neither the FWV Sub-Area Goals or the TEOs address the mission related Aircraft Payoffs of; Lethality, Susceptibly, Operational Readiness or Vulnerability. These Aircraft Payoffs had very little influence on the eventual prioritization of FWV technologies.
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