Shainin Medal – Yoji Akao
The Shainin Medal is awarded to an individual for the development and application of creative or unique statistical approaches in the solving of problems relative to the quality of a product or service.
Shainin Medal presented to Yoji Akao
“For his distinguished contributions to pragmatic problem solving in design of products and services through creation, development, and promotion of quality function deployment as a methodology for aligning customer needs to business requirements and technical capabilities”
Acceptance Speech:
I am very honored to receive the Dorian Shainin Medal on this occasion. I understand that the medal is awarded for developing and practicing problem-solving techniques on quality. After having dedicated 40 years of my life in developing and leading Quality Function Deployment (QFD), I feel particularly privileged that this high recognition was given for QFD.
I started contributing articles on the quality of design in 1966 but initially it attracted little attention. As the Japanese industry began to grow, particularly in the auto industry, the need to bridge the gap between design and production became increasingly apparent. In 1972, the term “quality deployment” appeared in the quality magazine for the first time, followed by a report of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in which the now famous “quality table” was presented.
Professor Shigeru Mizuno and I coauthored the first book on QFD in 1978. About the same time, the QFD Study Group was formed in Japan among academia with Professors Hisakazu Shindo, Tadashi Yoshizawa, Tadashi Ofuji, and Michiteru Ono. In 2003, QFD was officially adopted as Japan Industrial Standards JISQ 9025.
QFD transforms customer requirements into technical languages (quality parameters) by means of quality tables and confirms quality of design. Thus, the intention of the design can be practically communicated to production. In other words, it builds a bridge between the customers’ territory and the technology’s territory.
It was a four- day seminar in 1983 that introduced QFD for the first time in the USA, and I made my presentation on QFD together with Professors Masao Kogure and Yasushi Furukawa and others. This seminar was organized by Masaaki Imai, chairman of the Kaizen Institute. In the following year, Bob King of Goal QPC started a series of QFD seminars in the United States. and I had the honor of being invited for more than 10 years to introduce QFD to the North American audience.
I recall former ASQ Chairman Greg Watson attending the events in those early days and I am grateful that our encounter led to my receiving this prestigious medal.
In 1989, the first North American QFD Symposium was held. Realizing that several QFD events were developing in the United States, I suggested Glenn Mazur to integrate QFD activities in the United States and the North American QFD Institute was born in 1993.
The first international QFD symposium was held in Japan in 1995 by JUSE and since then the symposium has been held every year in different countries. This year, the 13th ISQFD will be held in Williamsburg on September 7th and 8th.
It gives me great gratification to note that QFD has been spread throughout the world and that the number of accesses to QFD on Google is reaching 1.5 million. I am also pleased that Professor Noriaki Kano, who has made a contribution to QFD with his famous Kano Model, is a recipient of the Grant Medal.
There exists a countless number of quality requirements at every process before the final products are made, and no one can grasp such a chain of requirements for all processes. QFD is the instrument to visualize various factors a priori which create quality problems at every process, and establish priorities to deal with them.
It is my sincere hope that QFD will be widely applied to enhance the quality of life of human beings
Return to 2006-07 Award Recipients • Return to top
