TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT, VOL. 12, NO.

3, 2001, 365 ±372

The development of an ideal kindergarten

through concept engineering/quality function
deployment

PatriÂcia Moura e Sa 1 & Pedro Saraiva2

1
School of Economics, University of Coimbra, Av. Dias da Silva, 165±3004±512 Coimbra,
Portugal & 2Department of Chemical Engineering; PoÂlo II, University of Coimbra, Portugal

abstract This paper summarizes the application of quality planning tools to the development of
an ideal kindergarten, built from the needs and perceptions identi®ed for diþerent sorts of customers
(children, teachers and parents). For that purpose, intensive ®eldwork was conducted on site at a
rich sample of seven kindergartens, including 62 exploratory interviews. By adopting concept
engineering and quality function deployment techniques, the several stakeholders were given the
chance of freely expressing their ideas and expectations about an ideal kindergarten. In order to
explore all the richness associated with all the qualitative data collected, tools such as MPM, KJ and
Kano analysis were applied. Then, using the Pugh methodology, we built and determined an ideal
kindergarten concept. Finally, the House of Quality was built to de®ne the kindergarten speci®cations,
identify adequate measurement instruments and assign targets to the most important parameters. The
combined and creative use of these approaches resulted in a strongly customer-oriented kindergarten
that actively encourages the involvement of the whole community and family generations in
educational activities, and promotes interaction with its surrounding environment.

Introduction
Given the resources that governments and families allocate to education, its importance for
survival and competitiveness, quality in education, is becoming more and more a priority for
modern societies (World Bank, 1995). In this regard, many countries have been paying
special attention to the kindergarten level, since it is at this stage that most attitudes and
abilities of individuals (including their position towards school) are de®ned. Furthermore,
and at all educational levels, market forces have begun to play a decisive role over the last
decade. Facing a new and ever-changing environment, schools are thus expected to become
more and more responsive to students’ needs and parents’ and employers’ requirements.
In this context, the applicability of total quality management (TQM) theories in the
educational sector has attracted the interest of many theorists and practitioners. Apparently,
successful implementation of TQM in educational settings has been widely reported. Some
cases refer to the application of TQM methodologies in the development of a curriculum,
others focus on the impact of TQM on the teaching and learning process. Less frequently,

Correspondence: P. Moura e SaÂ. Tel: + 351 2 39 790574; Fax: + 351 2 39 403511; E-mail: P.Mouraesa@
shu.ac.uk

ISSN 0954-4127 print/ISSN 1360-0613 online/00/030365-08 € 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/09544120120034500
366 Â & P. SARAIVA
P. MOURA E SA

they mention how TQM changed the way the school operates on a daily basis. The question
that we shall address in this article refers, however, to another issue: How can we make
things work from the beginning? Quality planning and concept engineering are the key ideas
if mistakes are to be avoided, customer satisfaction maximized and pro®tability increased.
In a setting driven by market principles, it is common sense to state that the success of
a kindergarten depends on its ability to identify and respond eþectively to the criteria parents
use when selecting a school for their children. However, this may not be enough. Children’s
wants and educators’ needs are also to be taken into account. In a broad sense, all of them
are customers that the new kindergarten wants to please.
Quality approaches, such as the ones we applied in this study, can be very useful in
identifying and anticipating the kind of educational `product’ parents, educators, children
and the community as a whole are seeking. To a certain extent, kindergartens are in a better
position than other schools for adopting many of the TQM principles, since they tend to
have more control over their own staþ and school environment than other educational
institutions. In many European countries reforms are being implemented with the aim of
reinforcing this autonomy and introducing new educational practices. Thus, children are
being inspired to develop both social and academic competencies, valuing cultural diþerences
that exist from one local community to another.

Methodology and main results

In the development of the ideal kindergarten school, both concept engineering (CE) and
quality function deployment (QFD) (Akao, 1990) methodologies were applied (Fig. 1).
CE is a structured process aimed at understanding customers’ needs and building a

COLLECTING CUSTOMER VOICES

TRANSFORMATION OF VOICES INTO

CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER
REQUIREMENTS

DEFINING THE NEW PRODUCT CONCEPT

CONVERTING CUSTOMER
REQUIREMENTS INTO PRODUCT
SPECIFICATIONS

Figure 1. Main steps taken to build a new kindergarten concept.

 AN IDEAL KINDERGARTEN 367

product concept that meets them; it is based upon market-in, WV problem-solving and
®shbowl principles (Centre for Quality Management, 1995; Shiba, 1995). QFD (Hauser &
Clausing, 1988) can be extremely useful, since it enables the product development team to
focus proactively on customer requirements.
Within the county of Coimbra (Portugal), seven kindergartens were selected, including
public and private, rural and urban, small and large, old and recent ones. At these sites, 62
exploratory interviews (31 children, 17 parents and 14 teachers) were conducted, in order to
collect customer voices, showing that, as we shall see later, there is a number of un®lled
needs at existing kindergarten. Then, we assumed the following to be the main categories of
kindergarten clients:
· parents (who pay all the fees and are responsible for the choice of a particular
kindergarten);
· children (immediate education clients);
· teachers (mainly internal customers, playing a key role in the education processes).

This was followed by an exhaustive process of customer voices collection and treatment,
through observation, direct contact and interviews with the above sets of clients in the
kindergarten environment. The voice of the customer (VOC) is the main input of the design
process, leading to the identi®cation of critical product dimensions. Thus, if customer needs
and expectations are to be met (and exceeded), an additional eþort must be put on collecting
customers’ personal experiences and feelings.
In the children’s case, given their age, special care was taken when collecting voices from
this subset of customers. First, we spent quite some time together with them, in order to
become acquainted and for them to feel at ease with the interviewer. This was followed by a
careful observation of their behaviour and opinions, leading to results that were on some
occasions very interesting, as much as unexpected. In fact, once we are able to overcome the
barriers that made us look at the kindergarten from an adult perspective, a totally diþerent
and new universe opened up, associated with the way children feel and live a kindergarten.
As a result of these eþorts, we were able to identify more than 250 customer voices, some of
which are presented in Table 1.
Customer voices were then converted into requirements, by means of an adequate
semantic translation technique (Fig. 2), resulting in a set of around 120 customer require-
ments. Some of these customer requirements, which an ideal kindergarten should be able to
ful®l entirely, are shown in Table 2.
Since the new product design needs to be focused on a few key points (the ones that are
potentially critical to its success), priorities must be set. Taking this goal into account, the
MPM technique (Centre for Quality of Management, 1991), based on an iterative selection

Table 1. Some customer voices

1. I cannot park my car when I come to the kindergarten

2. I fully trust the teacher
3. I dream of a school without teachers
4. I wish I had a dinosaur in my classroom
5. The school should have a mission
6. The school gives my child the opportunity to go where I could not take him
7. When I go to work, I want to make sure that my child is completely safe
8. Sometimes stairs are dangerous
9. The kindergarten should provide the children with adequate food
10. The educators should develop teamwork
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VOICES IMAGES KEY WORDS REQUIREMENTS

I wish my school Responsibility The kindergarten has

had
pets.
· a fish in the
classroom Affectivity
· dinosaurs
· a dog and a cat

Figure 2. Example of the semantic translation process.

Table 2. Sample of customer requirements

1. There is an appropriate ratio between the number of children and the existing area
2. There is a place where children can practise sport activities
3. The children’s works are an element of the kindergarten decoration
4. The kindergarten respects the individuality of each child
5. The children face situations where they need to make decisions for themselves
6. The kindergarten has stable personnel
7. The kindergarten director has a management background
8. There is a common way of working between the educators
9. The parents come to the kindergarten to speak about their own experiences
10. The kindergarten creates ways for children to learn about the community’s local traditions and values

process, was then applied. In each run a fraction of the initial requisites was chosen, thus
progressively leading us to the selection of a subset of 24 critical requirements.
Next, in order to get a better understanding of their underlying meaning, exploring
potential associations among them, an aýnity diagram (KJ) (Centre for Quality of Manage-
ment, 1991) was built. This resulted in the identi®cation of four main groups of ideas that
convey the clients’ concerns about a kindergarten:

· Children’s development (including values about living in society and respect for the
diþerences).
· Openness to the external environment (based upon the integration of the kindergarten
within the scope of the community where it is located).
· Organizational culture (related with adequate human resources and management
features).
· Working environment (namely through care about spaces and equipment, well-being
of children and teachers).

In order to complement the treatment of customer requirements carried out so far, we tried
to get a deeper feeling of how they translate into customer satisfaction by conducting a Kano
analysis (Centre for Quality of Management, 1995). According to the customers’ opinions
related with the presence/absence of each kindergarten feature, obtained through a written
survey, each of them was classi®ed into one of the four following main categories: attractive,
 AN IDEAL KINDERGARTEN 369

ATTRACTIVE

ONE-DIMENSIONAL

MUST-BE

Figure 3. Kano mapping of customer requirements (numbered according to Table 2).

one-dimensional, must-be and neutral. Figure 3 shows how the 10 customer requirements
mentioned earlier (Table 2) ®t in each of the diþerent categories.
One can see that most of the requirements were found to be one-dimensional, although
the number of attractive features is also signi®cant, therefore providing room for the de®nition
of a new product concept, able to diþerentiate itself from existing supply by concentrating
on such attractive requirements.
Keeping in mind all the information collected up to this stage, we then moved to
conceiving a new kindergarten, exploring for this purpose the Pugh methodology (Pugh,
1996). Through this approach, starting with a number of possible diþerent kindergarten
concepts, we successively combined parts of them, in order to exploit their relative advantages
and obtain in the end a `winner concept’. Table 3 presents the ®nal matrix obtained, after
two iterations. The winning concept is that of a `learning bandstand’, de®ned as being: a
relatively small kindergarten that encourages an innovative learning environment, where
children have a strong participation and freedom, with ecological and cultural concerns,
building client±supplier relationships with parents and the local community.
Having chosen a kindergarten concept, we ®nally moved into building the House of
Quality (Hauser & Clausing, 1988). At this stage, we de®ned its technical speci®cations,
clarifying how customer requirements will be measured and met. This resulted in a very well-
de®ned kindergarten model, which was then tested and evaluated in a preliminar y way by
parents, educators and children. Figure 4 presents a small portion for the House of Quality
thus obtained (the complete results can be found in Sa (1998)).
We believe that the newly designed kindergarten has strong competitive advantages
(Table 4). Furthermore, it is important to notice that, according to the data collected, the
®rst kindergarten choice is decisive, since children tend to stay in the same place for years,
unless there is a strong reason to withdraw from a particular school. Thus, it is critical for
the new kindergarten to establish an appropriate promotion campaign, providing parents
with the right tangible clues that make them believe it.

Conclusion
The results that we have obtained show that QFD and CE are indeed quality planning
methodologies that may be very helpful and useful when applied to education and schools.
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Table 3. Pugh matrix

Reinvented Green Small Family

knowledge sports apprentice Curiosity ecological Learning
lighthouse park fable orchestra village bandstand

16. To discuss child’s eventual

problems S Ð Ð Ð S R
13. Civic conscience Ð S + Ð S E
5. Hygiene and cleanliness S S Ð Ð S F
1. Keep in touch with nature Ð S Ð Ð Ð E
9. To respect the child’s individuality S Ð Ð S S R
3. Appropriate area/child ratio Ð S S S S E
4. Have a place to practice sport
activities Ð + Ð Ð Ð N
11. Freedom of choice for some
activities Ð Ð Ð S Ð C
2. Have pets Ð Ð Ð Ð S E
24. Promote the community’s local
traditions and values Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð
18. Education and training S Ð Ð S Ð
23. Keep in touch with other realities
and environments Ð Ð Ð S Ð

Totals + 0 1 1 0 0
S 4 4 1 5 6
2 8 7 10 7 6

+ better
S similiar
2 worse

Table 4. Main competitive advantages

· Existence of pets, which play an important role in the children’s education, not only for sentimental
reasons, but also because they contribute to the development of a sense of responsibility
· Priority given to the training of the school’s director, who will learn about ®nancial, personnel and
TQM, in order to solve better the kindergarten problems, increasing pro®tability and customer
satisfaction
· Rede®nition of the supporting staþ role (inside and outside the classroom) who, with adequate
training, will be responsible for many extracurricular activities, especially the ones concerning sports
and cultural animation
· Co-operation among institutions that operate in diþerent environments, providing children with the
opportunity to meet other realities and cultures
· Creation of a document establishing the main school values and establishing the ®rst step to building
a strong institutional culture. This charter of rights and duties will encourage teamwork, since
teachers, parents and children agree that this is the most eþective way to learn and solve educational
problems

With the adaptations felt to be convenient, they led us to the integrated de®nition of a new
kindergarten concept and the associated technical speci®cations, believed to oþer clear
competitive advantages over existing competitors.
At the same time, the developed kindergarten concept (learning bandstand) combines
both of the pre-school educational perspectives, one more oriented towards child development
with regard to the following school level, and the other one more concerned with the
development of social competencies (Katz & McCellan, 1996). One can state that parents,
 AN IDEAL KINDERGARTEN 371

Figure 4. House of Quality.

children and educators, despite some obvious diþerences, are all seeking an open atmosphere
that encourages the joy of learning, without discarding a minimum of discipline.
Our study also indicates that the school’s answer to many of the expectations of its
`customers’ can be found in the application of an integrated management model based on
the EFQM criteria. The use of such a reference tool has the main bene®t of making schools
aware of the need to develop a strategic plan and share a vision with all their stakeholders.
There seems, therefore, to be plenty of room, as our study points out, for further
372 Â & P. SARAIVA
P. MOURA E SA

research activities in this ®eld. However, the practical relevance of such research eþorts is
limited by the willingness of schools to implement quality initiatives. Although we are
conscious about all the limitations that this may place, we are also sure that it is through the
roads of excellence that schools must guide themselves and move into the future.

References
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Centre for Quality of Management (1991) The Language ProcessingTM Method (CQM).
Hauser, J.R. & Clausing, D. (1988) The House of Quality, Harvard Business Review, No. 3, May/ June.
Katz, L. & McCellan, D. (1996) O papel do professor no desenvolvimento social das criancËas. In: EducacË aÄo
PreÂ-EscolarÐA ConstrucËaÄo Social da Moralidade por JuÂlia Formosinho (Lisbon, Texto Editora), pp. 11±50.
Pugh, S. (1996) In: D. Clausing & R. Andrade (Eds) Creating Innovative Products Using Total Design: The
Living Legacy of Stuart Pugh (Addison-Wesley).
Sa , P. (1998) GestaÄo da qualidade total nas escolas: o planeamento da qualidade aplicado ao ensino preÂ-
escolar, MSc Thesis, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra.
Shiba, S. (1995) La Conception aÁ l’ E Â coute du MarcheÂÐOrganiser l’eÂcoute des Clients pour en Faire un Avantage
Concurrentiel, 1st Edn (Paris, INSEP Editions).
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