Professional Documents
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1.0 Introduction
QFD is a technique invented in Japan in the late 1960s (for the design of large ships). It is a
method applicable to any team based planning process where the requirement is to
systematically prioritise responses to a given set of objectives. Objectives are sometimes
known as “whats”, the responses “hows”. The use of QFD spread to the west in the early
1980’s & came to be known as part of the set of tools used to implement Total Quality
Management (TQM).
In industry QFD is an interdisciplinary team process used to plan & develop new or improved
products & services, the key features being that it:
The QFD process starts with the needs of the customer & applies them to the whole product
development life cycle i.e. concept, development, planning & production.
2.1 Introduction
The QFD process consists of developing either one or a number of matrices (also known as
quality tables), each of which has a specific purpose. The first of these is known as the
‘House of Quality’ or HOQ
5
Technical
Correlations
3 Technical Response
1. 4 2
6 Technical Matrix
e.g. A customer asks for a car with tinted glass … is this a need?
The customer may need some of the things tinted glass provides:
But there are a number of possible technical solutions to meet these needs tinted glass is not
the only answer. (e.g. A cooler interior can be achieved by air conditioning or increased
ventilation).
When asked what they want, customers often ask for the specific technical solution & don’t
define what they actually need, the developer has to dig deeper than this initial response.
This stage will generate large amounts of qualitative information, which needs to be
structured to be useful for further analysis. A typical method for doing this involves
constructing affinity diagrams & tree diagrams
An affinity diagram is used to gather large amounts of qualitative data & organise it into
subgroups based on similarities between data items. The QFD process collects or generates
a large set of customer needs for a product, in an unstructured form. The development team
can pair up needs based on similar attributes using intuition or gut feelings. The pairs can be
further aggregated into larger common themes.
After grouping the needs, a tree diagram can be constructed, the branches of which can be
used to look for any gaps omissions or errors in the affinity diagram & which can then be
added to the QFD matrix:
This section helps the development team prioritise customer needs, recognising that
resources aren’t unlimited. Filling in the matrix gives a method for comparing current product
performance against that of the competition & developing a strategy to optimise customer
satisfaction. The matrix consists of a series of columns representing key product planning
information for each customer need.
customer satisfaction
importance
goal sales
point
Importance: A numeric description of the importance of the different needs to the customer,
typically from a customer survey. It may use absolute, relative or ordinal measures to specify
importance.
Goal: Here the team decides what level of customer satisfaction they are to aim at in meeting
the customer need - the goal. This is often expressed on the same scale as the above
satisfaction ratings. This is arrived at by considering current performance & the importance of
each need. Goals set here have a major impact of the product development.
Improvement Ratio: This ratio takes into account the effort required to achieve the goals set in
the pervious column, & hence reorders the importance of the customer needs. It is commonly
assessed as follows:
Sales Point This reflects the perceived sales benefits based on how well the customer need
is met. e.g. 1 = no sales point , 1.5 = strong sales point
Weighting: this gives a figure for the overall importance of each customer need to the
development team & hence sets their priorities. It can be calculated as follows
The technical response is a high level technical description of the proposed product/service in
terms of Substitute Quality Characteristics (SQC) or Product Technical Requirements (PTR),
usually generated from the customer’s needs/wants. There are several ways of defining the
SQCs, one common one being in terms of Performance Measures directly derived from
customer needs
SQC Direction of
goodness
Length Target
Time between sharpening MTB = More the Better
Lead dust generated LTB= Less the Better
Pages per pencil MTB
Pressure cycles to erase LTB
Contains judgements made by the development team about the strength of the relationship
between each want/need & each technical response (SQC)
The impact of an SQC on the customer satisfaction for a particular customer need can has
four possibilities:
There is a strong link between the customer requirement that the point should last a long time
& the SQC of the time between sharpening.
The roof of the ‘house’, this defines the interrelationships between the elements of the
technical response (SQCs). It is a key area as regards concurrent engineering as it shows
which technical areas need to collaborate closely & communicate effectively.
As the value of one SQC is changed, another may be impacted, either in it’s ‘direction of
goodness or the opposite direction. The degree & direction of impact can have a major impact
on the product development.
For example in the case of the pencil, there is a strong positive correlation between the time
between sharpening & the number of pages per pencil.
The technical matrix is concerned with issues relating to the technical responses to customer
needs.
priorities
comp benchmarks
own performance
targets
Priorities:
This section is used to calculate the relative contributions of the SQCs to overall customer
satisfaction, a key QFD result.
Repeating this process for all SQCs allows their relative contribution towards customer
satisfaction to be assessed & hence their relative importance in the development effort.
Competitive Benchmarking:
After determining which SQCs are the most important (see above), the development team
can then go on to determine if their product is going to be competitive, by benchmarking
them. Competitive benchmarking is a process of examining the competition’s product &
comparing with one’s own, with the aim of improving one’s own product. The process will
often involve assessing the competitor products using the same performance measures used
to define the SQCs. The data may be presented numerically or graphically as below:
1
2 Our performance
3 Competitor
4
5
Targets:
The aim here is to set (numerical) targets for SQCs, which will drive all subsequent
development work. Setting targets is nothing new, but QFD avoids the team considering a
mixture of customer related & technical goals that may be unrelated & not in a prioritised
form. The targets in QFD relate directly back to customer needs & are related to the
competition & our own current performance. Numeric targets may be set as follows:
Generally, the aim should be to exceed the best of the competition for SQCs which matter
most to overall customer satisfaction.
3.1 Introduction
The basic HOQ may be extended, typically to include costing information within the technical
matrix Because this is adding to the bottom of the HOQ, this is sometimes known as the
‘basement’. Alternatively, additional matrices & other analyses can be linked to the HOQ,
which aid the more detailed decisions that have to be made in developing a product or
service. Several different configurations have been proposed, but one which is often used for
product development uses four matrices.
A number of matrices can be linked together so that the outcomes from one matrix become
the inputs to the following one. In other words, the how’s of one matrix become the what’s of
the next.
Voice
of
Cust.
The next step is to estimate the impact of each part characteristic on the performance
measures (SQCs) taken from the House of Quality. After doing similar calculations to those
used to calculate SQC priorities, the relative importance of the part characteristics are
calculated. This tells the developers which parts & characteristics are the drivers of customer
satisfaction.
Referring back to the pencil example, the part characteristics might include the graphite,
eraser, body, point & graphics
These process parameters become the “how’s” in the matrix & are prioritised on the basis of
their impact on the part characteristics.
machine settings
control methods
control documentation
operator training requirements
The planner fills in the chart with comments, target values or any other appropriate method.
The chart aims to make sure everything that impact customer satisfaction is checked.
Cost reduction
QFD contributes to cost reduction by streamlining processes & reducing rework & waste. It
does this by focusing the development team on activities which matter most to the customer &
away from those that have little to do with customer satisfaction. QFD also reduces the
likelihood of ill-considered changes during the development as any proposals can be checked
back against the original criteria, Thus rushed decisions which don’t take into account the
whole product & the needs of the customer can be avoided.
On the surface QFD may appear to add to the problem as a QFD analysis requires
(potentially long) meetings involving a lot of people. However the systematic nature of the
process avoids much of the time wasting that would otherwise happen, but which isn’t
generally noticed.
For example development time can be reduced through there being less mid-project changes
(see above) & less implementation errors due to the systematic planning carried through from
the initial ‘voice of the customer’.
Improved communication
QFD is a team based activity, together, the language of one phase of the development is
translated into that needed for the following stages, this increases the overall understanding
of all members of the team. The systematic nature of the process helps focus on facts rather
than feelings & because the decision process is recorded it can be re-examined at any time.
Promotes teamwork
QFD brings together multifunctional teams to develop the House Of Quality, & at all
subsequent stages keeps the team focused on what matters (i.e. customer satisfaction),
allowing prioritised optimisation of the product.
Cohen, L. (1995) Quality Function Deployment: Making QFD work for you. Addison Wesley.
Reading, MA, USA
Shillito, M. Larry (1994) Advanced QFD : Linking technology to market & company needs.
Wiley
Zhang, X.P., Bode, J., Ren S.J. (1997) Neural Networks In Quality Function Deployment.
Computers & Industrial Engineering, 1996, vol.31, no.3-4, 669-673