Quality Function Deployment

QFD
Introduction
• Quality function deployment was first developed in Japan in
the Kobe Shipyards in 1970.

• Today more than 10,000 companies in America and West

Europe are utilizing the techniques of QFD.
• Automotive industry the utmost in implementation of QFD
 What is QFD?
• QFD is an analytical process which provides an approach to deploying the voice
of the customer through all aspects of the product development process.

• It is a planning tool used to fulfill customer expectations.

• A disciplined approach to product design, engineering, and production and

provides in-depth evaluation of a product.

• Using QFD for new product development always involves a cross-functional

team with the skills necessary for designing the product, writing engineering
specifications, purchasing materials, and planning the tooling and production
work.
 What is QFD?
• The efforts of these teams eliminate rework and typically reduce development
time by as much as 50%.

• QFD helps identify new quality technology and job functions to carry out
operations.

• QFD results are measured based on the number design and engineering changes,
time to market, cost and quality.

• QFD enables the design phase to concentrate on customer requirements,

spending less time on redesign and modifications.
Two Types of Teams in
QFD
• A. New product.

• B. Improving an existing product.

• Teams consist of members from marketing,

design, quality, finance and production.
Team Meetings

• A. The project manager and team members need to commit a

significant amount of time, especially in the early stages.

• B. Priorities and the scope of the project need to be clearly

defined and told to all departments within the organization so
time can be budgeted appropriately.

• C. Duration of meetings vary depending on where team’s

members are coming from and what needs to be
accomplished.
Benefits of QFD
Customer Driven
Reduces Implementation Time
Promotes Teamwork
Provides Documentation
The Voice of the Customer
The Voice of the Customer
QFD begins with marketing to find
out what exactly the customer
wants from a product.
Sources for Determining
Customer Expectations

1. Focus Groups
2. Surveys
3. Complaints
4. Consultants
5. Standards
6. Federal Regulations
The QFD Team Must Continually Ask:

1. What does the customer really want?

2. What are the customer’s expectations?
3. Are the customer’s expectations used to drive
the design process?
4. What can the design team do to achieve
customer satisfaction?
Collecting the Data
•Solicited
•Unsolicited
•Quantitative
•Qualitative
•Structured
•Random
 Organizing the Data
The Affinity Diagram gathers a large amount of
data and organizes the data into groups based on
natural interrelationships.
• The Affinity Diagram is ideally suited for most
QFD applications;
Other data organizers include:
• Interrelationship Diagrams, Tree Diagrams,
Cause and Effect Diagrams
Organizing the Data
Reasons to implement :
1. Thoughts are too widely dispersed or numerous to
organize.

2. New solutions are needed to circumvent the more

traditional ways of problem solving.

3. 3. Support for a solution is essential for successful

implementation.
Constructing the Affinity
Diagram

• Phrase the objective

• Record all responses
• Group the responses
• Organize groups in an affinity diagram
Affinity diagrams
 House of Quality
• The primary planning tool used in QFD is the
house of quality.

• Building a House of Quality

Hierarchy trees
A Hierarchy tree or Tree Diagram also illustrates the structure of
interrelationships between groups of statements but is built from
the top down in an analytical manner. It is usually applied to an
existing set of structured information such as that produced by
building an Affinity Diagram and is used to account for flaws or
incompleteness in the source data. Working down from the top a
team can amendments at each level and the completed hierarchy
can be drawn as shown below.
Matrices and tables
The matrix is a tool which lies at the heart of many QFD methods. By
comparing two lists of items using a rectangular grid of cells, it can be
used to document a team's perceptions of the interrelationships that
exist, in a manner which can be later interpreted by considering the
entries in particular cells, rows or columns. In a prioritization matrix the
relative importance of items in a list and the strength of
interrelationships are given numerical weightings (shown as numbers or
symbols). The overall priority of the items of one list according to their
relationships with another list, can then be calculated as shown below.
Left side = Voice of customer
Right side = prioritized customer
requirements
Ceiling or second floor = technical
descriptors, engineering characteristics,
design constraints and parameters
Interior walls = relationship between
customer requirements and technical
descriptors
Roof = interrelationship between technical
descriptors
Foundation = prioritized technical
descriptors, benchmarking, technical
difficulty degrees and target values
 QFD
• It is often called a House of Quality because:
• Customer information is shown horizontally
• Technical information is shown vertically

Customer
Information

Technical
Information
QFD

• Building a QFD
• Determine the Voice of the Customer
• Have the customer rank the relative importance of his/her wants
• Have the customer evaluate your company against competitors
• Determine how the wants will be met
• Determine the direction of improvement for the technical requirements
• Determine the operational goals for the technical requirements
• Determine the relationship between each of the customer wants and the
technical requirements
• Determine the correlation between the technical requirements.
• Compare the technical performance with that of competitors
• Determine the column weights
• Add regulatory and/or internal requirements
• Analyze the QFD matrix
QFD

• Determine the Voice of the Customer

• Capture the Voice of the Customer
• Organize the Voice of the Customer

• Determine the Voice of the Customer: Four types of customers

• Those customers we already have and can’t lose
• Those customers we could lose easily
• Those customers we could gain with minor product changes
• Those customers we can’t get.
 QFD
• Determine the Voice of the Customer: Capturing Customer information
• Determine people to talk to
• Determine the target market
• Determine whether or not to survey with or without samples of the
current product
• Determine whether or not to use an outside organization to conduct
the surveys

• Determine people to talk to

• Determine how to contact the customers
• Focus groups
• Interviews (telephone, one-on-one, web/email)
• Questionnaires
• Observations