AM Workshops: 9:00 – 12:00 (workshops will include one (1) 15 minute break)

Changes in the marketplace demand a deeper and different kind of customer understanding that only comes from immersing yourself in your customer's world. No longer the role of one function, innovation demands that everyone in an organization see his/her role in the light of the real needs it serves. Deep insight into the meaning of customer's behavior and unarticulated needs take center stage aligning the organization and its strategy. The most useful tools we have for getting this perspective come from anthropology. Called ethnography or observational research, these approaches provide direct experience of what it's like to walk a mile in someone else's shoes and yield highly predictive data – an early warning system of evolving lifestyles, behavior and trends.

When a diverse team (product development, marketing, consumer insights) goes out together into the customer's real world, what they see and hear acts as a springboard for their own dialogue. Innovation – both the insights and the commitment necessary to implement them – come from this team based approach. Customer understanding is everyone's business. In this highly interactive workshop we will explore:

WHY it has become critical for teams to gather and interpret their own ethnographic data WHAT… Go to the source: ethnographic/observational research

• Tools
• Benefits
• When?

HOW… A multifunctional team approach
• Consumer Needs: the glue that connects us
• Research with a difference
• Consumer understanding is everyone's business
• Value for the individual, team, and organization
• Hopeful leadership

Facilitator: Dr. Barbara Perry, Cultural Anthropologist– Barbara Perry Associates

The #1 factor in determining the success or failure of a new offering is the prior understanding of customers and the market. But how do you do this? What tools do you use and when?

This half day workshop allows you to learn the latest techniques for capturing the Voice of the Customer. You will come away with the best 10 techniques to capture the needs of your market and help ensure a successful new product launch. The workshop is highly interactive, with attendees participating in live demonstrations. You'll know which of the tools are best suited to each part of the "Fuzzy Front End" of innovation. These tools are applicable to either products or services, in both consumer and business markets.

Some of the attendee takeaways will be HOW TO:
• Uncover important customer needs
• Test brand new ideas and pick the most promising ones
• Find the optimal mix of features and price

Facilitator: Brian D. Ottum, Ph.D., President– Ottum Research & Consulting

12:00-1:00 Luncheon

PM Workshops: 1:00 – 4:00 (workshops will include one (1) 15 minute break)

Most of the emphasis in Voice of the Customer goes into the actual mechanics of gathering customer wants and needs. This is completely understandable, as this is the fun part! But what to do with all of that data after the Voice has been collected is where most of the make or break decisions occur, and most companies have no particular process to do this, and thus, grope around in the dark.

The answer for many companies has been to use Quality Function Deployment (QFD) or, as it is often called, "The House of Quality". But after more than 20 years, some have felt that the house was falling into disrepair and was declining in "market value". Then, along came the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) movement, and the old house seems to have undergone a major re-modeling – resulting in renewed "curb appeal"! Now its time to put the House of Quality back on the market!

Join VoC and QFD experts Gerry Katz and John Mitchell for this lively half-day seminar to learn how it's done, how it fits into DFSS, and to actually participate in a real world example.
Learn How To:
• Get Sales and Marketing people and Technical and Engineering people to speak the same common language
• Translate soft customer words into definitive technical engineering specifications
• Prioritize these specifications and how to decide analytically which ones are most deserving of investment of your limited R&D resources
• Use these specifications as a springboard for creative ideation

Facilitators: Gerry Katz, Executive Vice President& John Mitchell, Principal– Applied Marketing Science, Inc.

The practice of VoC techniques can yield powerful insights into your customers hidden needs. How do you assure yourself in a systematic way that these needs will be addressed in a design in a way that is optimal and does not conflict with other properties of the system? This session will focus on how to seamlessly integrate VoC with QFD, TRIZ, Axiomatic Design, FMEA, Risk Analysis, and DSM. Particular attention will be focused on how to engage in "Feed Forward" practices to review with customers design features that only reveal themselves as the design is developed. Finally, fidelity to the VoC will be evaluated using an explicit traceability methodology.

Attendees should learn:
1. How VoC integrates into other early stage design development processes
2. How to validate that the need expressed by the customer has been implemented in the design
3. How to extract hidden functionality in the design that may "Surprise and Delight" the customer

Facilitator: Matt Pallaver, CEO– Axiomatic Design Solutions, Inc.