Quality Function Deployment
•Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a structured approach to defining customer needs
or requirements and translating them into specific plans to produce products to meet those
needs.
•This focus on satisfying the customer's needs places an emphasis on techniques such as
Quality Function Deployment to help understand those needs and plan a product to provide
superior value.
•The basic Quality Function Deployment methodology involves four basic phases that occur
over the course of the product development process.
•During each phase one or more matrices are prepared to help plan and communicate
critical product and process planning and design information.
4 Phase QFD
House of Quality
Co relationship
Technical Specifications
Priority
Customer Competitive
Relationship matrix
Needs Assessment
Technical Evaluation
Technical attributes
Phase 1 Product Planning
Once customer needs are identified, preparation of the product planning matrix or "house
of quality" can begin. The sequence of preparing the product planning matrix is as follows:
1. Customer needs or requirements are stated on the left side of the matrix
• For each need or requirement, state the customer priorities using a 1 to 5
rating.
2. Evaluate prior generation products against competitive products.
• Use surveys, customer meetings or focus groups to obtain feedback.
• Include competitor's customers to get a balanced perspective.
• Identify price points and market segments for products under evaluation.
• Identify warranty, service, reliability, and customer complaint problems to
identify areas of improvement.
• Based on this, develop a product strategy.
3. Establish product requirements or technical specifications to respond to customer
requirements and organize into related categories.
•Characteristics should be meaningful, measurable, and global.
•Characteristics should be stated in a way to avoid implying a particular technical
solution so as not to constrain designers.
4. Develop relationships between customer requirements and product requirements or
technical characteristics.
• Use symbols for strong, medium and weak relationships.
5. Develop a technical evaluation of prior generation products and competitive products.
• Get access to competitive products to perform product or technical benchmarking.
• Perform this evaluation based on the defined product requirements or technical
characteristics.
• Obtain other relevant data such as warranty or service repair occurrences and costs
and consider this data in the technical evaluation.
6. Develop preliminary target values for product requirements or technical characteristics.
7. Determine potential positive and negative interactions between product requirements or
technical characteristics using symbols for strong or medium, positive or negative
relationships.
•Determine potential positive and negative interactions between product requirements
or technical characteristics using symbols for strong or medium, positive or negative
relationships.
•Too many positive interactions suggest potential redundancy in "the critical few"
product requirements or technical characteristics.
•Focus on negative interactions - consider product concepts or technology to overcome
these potential tradeoff's or consider the tradeoff's in establishing target values.
8. Analyze the matrix and finalize the product development strategy and product plans.
•Determine required actions and areas of focus. Finalize target values.
