Success Stories: Lincoln Electric

Developing Best of Class Products, Time and Time Again

Welders work under some pretty tough conditions. Not only do they have to carefully combine their skills with the capabilities of their equipment to produce safe infrastructure for the buildings, bridges, airplanes, etc. we take for granted, they also must often work in some very challenging environments.

The Lincoln Electric Company has always prided itself in producing the highest quality welding products on the market. To support its customers, Lincoln must understand their welding experience in detail. After several successful projects using PVM^sm and in direct comparisons with QFD and related VOC procedures, Lincoln formally adopted PVM as their standard product definition and discovey process in 1996.

Since that time, the Design Consortium has trained Lincoln

product managers and engineers to use PVM in their ongoing product development efforts. Lincoln managers now use PVM's predictive capability as a standard metric in their new product decision making. The Design Consortium continues to coach Lincoln's staff to get even better results from PVM, and it actively participates in Lincoln's major development projects.

It was no surprise when one of Lincoln's new PVM^sm based products received a tremendous review from an independent trade magazine. What was notable was that the review described the product's advantages nearly word for word as defined in the PVM specification. Not only did PVM help the Lincoln design team thoroughly understand what people would value in this product, it also translated that understanding into a final design that clearly "spoke" those same values.