Zero Snowboards is a company which will provide durable, high performance, ‘green’ snowboards to eco-friendly customers. Its goal is to provide a creative, innovative and cheap alternative to its customers while still maintaining exceptional quality. Zero believes that the goal of excellence and performance comes from a keen sense of quality in everything that it does and all of those it employs.

Giving customers more than what they expect and achieving it at a viable cost is of great importance and will provide an increase in customer satisfaction, positive feedback, free advertising by word of mouth and help to cement a great reputation as an inventive leader in the industry.   Zero will strive to focus mainly on exceeding customer needs, providing outstanding service, and dependability.

New requirements created by the market show up continuously and are driven by the customer. For Zero to be successful it is necessary that it fulfill all customer requirements. In this sense then, customer requirement analysis is a key component to overall quality. Some methods used for this include QFD (Quality Function Deployment), CORA (Component Oriented Requirements Analysis), process modeling such as CIMprg conducted in assignment 1, to name a few can help get a good idea of the functionalities of a given product, process, or service and achieve our goal with a companywide TQM approach.

The methodology applied for this particular assignment is the CORA. This method was developed by Professor Paul Ranky, PhD to analyze product/process and TQM/TQC needs. The CORA method is mainly based off of the QFD as well as other methods used to better quantify user requirements. The CORA method is a TOPS (Team Oriented Problem Solving) method which attempts to minimize all around dissatisfaction, financial loss and poor communication.

CORA is an iterative procedure that promotes systematic engineering team thinking when a new process or product, or system design is developed. CORA is applied during the planning stages of a product or process development project, as well as later for TQM /TQC and other purposes, and then updated as needed. The CORA team’s goals are to:

• Understand the requirements
• See the Solutions
• Apply learned Problem Solving Skills

CORA contains four modules; user requirements, engineering solutions, parameter calculations and benchmarking. They are linked and interact via a correlation matrix, which has user/customer requirements as values and by various algorithms one can identify solutions, critical priorities and actions, as well as a competitor’s position.

With the CORA now complete we first look at the Absolute Importance Rating (AIR).  We see that the most important engineering solutions are dealing with the core of the snowboard.  The core construction and material are a very important part of a ‘green’, responsive snowboard.  The next important solution is a tie between the waxing process and fiberglass material.

Although none of the engineering solutions we found to be most important were working with collaborative companies we can still see that it is important that working with these companies has helped meet customer requirements and that we should continue to work together to improve.

The CORA method is a valuable way to help understand all the users’ requirements as well as easy to use/interpret. By using this method Zero was able to determine in order the degree of importance a given solution is within the TQM process with the highest being core construction and material. By using this method Zero is one step further in achieving superior quality.