Catherine paid a visit to the Guangzhou office of Samsonite. After delivering a Briefing Session on QFD, she had a meeing with two product developers and a quality coordinator. In the meeting, on the one hand, the product developers informed Catherine that the major part of their work is to yield first samples according to the information given designers. However, the information received from designers has much reduced. In many cases, it could be as little as just a sketch. There is an increasing pressure on getting the first samples correct in the face of more and more new styles. On the other hand, the quality coordinator expressed that the importance of quality vastly grows, in terms of both the breadth and the depth, for being a world brand. Moreover, quality assurance has already extended upstream to the phase of product development. To address the current development of the industry, Catherine was glad to let them know that the purpose of the original development of QFD was to assure quality from product development to production. She adviced that the deployment concepts and techniques of QFD are useful for handling the increasing abstractness of design information and could offer assistance on getting first samples correct.
