Sample Article

Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

An Introduction to the 'House of Quality'

In a Nutshell

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a way of making the 'voice of the customer' heard throughout an organization. It is a systematic process for capturing customer requirements and translating these into requirements that must be met throughout the 'supply chain'. The result is a new set of target values for designers, production people, and even suppliers to aim at in order to produce the output desired by customers.

QFD is particularly valuable when design trade-offs are necessary to achieve the best overall solution, e.g. because some requirements conflict with others. QFD also enables a great deal of information to be summarized in the form of one or more charts. These charts capture customer and product data gleaned from many sources, as well as the design parameters chosen for the new product. In this way they provide a solid foundation for further improvement in subsequent design cycles.

QFD is sometimes referred to by other 'nicknames' - the voice of the customer (from its use as a way of communicating customer needs), or the House of Quality (from the characteristic house shape of a QFD chart).

History

The creation of QFD is generally attributed to Mitsubishi's Kobe shipyard in Japan. The original approach, conceived in the late 1960's, was adopted and developed by other Japanese companies, notably Toyota and its suppliers. In 1986 a study by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) revealed that 54% of 148 member companies surveyed were using QFD. The sectors with the highest penetration of QFD were transportation (86%), construction (82%), electronics (63%), and precision machinery (66%). Many of the service companies surveyed (32%) were also using QFD. Specific design applications in Japan range from home appliances and clothing to retail outlets and apartment layouts.

In the USA the first serious exponents of QFD were the 'big three' automotive manufacturers in the 1980's, and a few leading companies in other sectors such as electronics. However, the uptake of QFD in the Western world appears to have been fairly slow. There has been no survey comparable to the JUSE study regarding the spread of QFD in North America, and there are relatively few sources of literature and case studies, compared with other methodologies such as Benchmarking.

There is also some reluctance among users of QFD to publish and share information - much more so than with other quality-related methodologies. This may be because the data captured and the decisions made using QFD usually relate to future product plans, and are therefore sensitive, proprietary, and valuable to competitors.

Benefits of QFD

The main 'process' benefits of using QFD are:

improved communication and sharing of information within a cross-functional team charged with developing a new product. This team will typically include people from a variety of functional groups, such as marketing, sales, service, distribution, product engineering, process engineering, procurement, and production
the identification of 'holes' in the current knowledge of the design team
the capture and display of a wide variety of important design information in one place in a compact form
support for understanding, consensus, and decision making, especially when complex relationships and trade-offs are involved
the creation of an informational base which is valuable for repeated cycles of product improvement

The main 'bottom line' benefits of using QFD are:

greater likelihood of product success in the marketplace, due to the precise targeting of key customer requirements
reduced overall design cycle time, mainly due to a reduction in time-consuming design changes. This is a powerful benefit: customer requirements are less likely to have changed since the beginning of the design project; and more frequent design cycles mean that products can be improved more rapidly than the competition
reduced overall cost due to reducing design changes, which are not only time consuming but very costly, especially those which occur at a late stage.
reduced product cost by eliminating redundant features and over-design.

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