Trace the History of Quality Function Deployment

• Dr.Mizuno of the Tokyo Institute of Technology is credited with initiating the Quality function deployment (DFD System).
• First implemented in Mitsubish, Heavy Industries Limited, in Kobe Shipyard, in Japan in 1972.
• QFD was introduced in the US in 1984 by Dr. Clausing of Xerox Corporation

What is Quality Function Deployment? (DFD)

1. Quality function deployment is a planning tool used to fulfill customer expectations. 
2. It is a disciplined approach to prdouct design, engineering, and production and provides in-depth evaluation of a product.
3. An organization can improve engineering knowledge, productivity and quality and reduce costs, product development time and engineering changes by implementing QFD.
4. QFD focuses on customer expectations or requirements.
5. It is employed to translate customer expectations in terms of specific requirements, into directions and actions, in terms of engineering or technical characteristics.

QFD can be deployed through:

1. Product planning
2. Part development
3. Process planning
4. Production planning
5. Service Industries

• Quality function deployment is a team-based management tool in chich customer expectations are used to drive the rpduct development process. Conflicting characteristics are identified early in the QFD process and can be resolved before production.
• Quality function deployment helps identify new quality technology and job functions to carry out operations.  This tool provides a historic reference to enhance future technology and prevent design errors. 
• QFD is primarily a set of graphically orieinted planning matrices that are used as the basis for decisions affecting any phase of the product development cycle. 
• Results of QFD are measured based on:
• the number of design and engineering changes,
• time to market,
• cost and
• quality. 
• It is considered by many experts to be a perfect blue print for quality by design.
• QFD enables the design phase to concentrate on the customer requirements therby spending less time on redesing and modifications.
• The goal of QFD is also to exceed customer expectations. Each QFD team must make its product more appealing than the existing product or more appealing than the competitor.

• Improves customer satisfaction
• Creates focus on customer requirements
• Uses competitive information effectively
• Prioritizes resources
• Identifies items that can be acted upon
• Structures resident experience/information
• Reduces implementation time
• Decreases midstream design changes
• Limites post introduction problems
• Avoids future development redundancies
• Identifies future application opportunities
• Surfaces missing assumptions
• Promotes Teamwork
• Based on concerns
• Creates communication at interfaces
• Identifies actions at interfaces
• Creates global view out of details
• Provides documentation
• Documents rationale for design
• Is easy to assimilate
• Adds structure to the information
• Adapts to changes (a living document)
• Provides framework for sensitivity analysis

• When an organization decises to implement QFD, the project manager and team members need to be able to commit a significant amount of time to it, especially in the early stages. 
• The priorities of the projects need to be defined and told to all departments within the organization so team members can budget their time accordingly.
• Also, the scope of the project must be clearly defined.
• Communication is one of the most important tools in the QFD process.

There are two types of teams: Teams are composed of members from marketing, design, quality, finance and production.

• New product design team:
• Product improvement team.
• This team has only fewer members since the QFD process will only need to be modified.

Team meetings are an important tool in the QFD process. The leader ensures that meetings are run in an efficient manner. 

Since QFD concentrates on customer expectations and needs, a considerable amount of effort is put into research to determine customer expectations.  During the collection of information, the QFD team must continually ask and answer numerous questions, such as:

• What does the customer really want?
• What are the customer's expectations?
• Are the customer's expectations used to drive the design process?
• What can the design team do to achieve customer satisfaction?

• Solicited, measureable, and routine data:
• customer surveys, market surveys, and trade trials, working with preferred customers; analyzing products from other manufacturers, and buying back products from the field.  This tells how the organization is performing in the current market
• Unsolicited, measurable and routine data:
• Customer complaints or lawsuits.  This information is generally disliked; however provides valuable information.
• Solicited, objective and routine data:
• gathered from focus groups.  These groups can find out likes, dislikes, trends and opinions about current and future products.
• Solicited, subjective and haphazard data:
• usually gathered from trade visits, customer visits and independent consultants.  Very useful, however they can also be misleading, dpending on the quantity and frequency of information.
• Unsolicited, subjective and haphazard data:
• typically obtained from conventions, vendors, suppliers and employees.  This information is very valuable and often relates the true voice of the customer.

Different methods to organize information under DFD

• Affinity Diagrams
• Interrelationship Diagrams,
• Tree Diagrams,
• Cause-and-effect Diagrams

All these methods are useful to sort large amounts of information

• An affinity diagrams is a tool that gethers a large amount of data and subsequently organized the data into groupoings based on their natural interelationships. It should be implemented when:
• Thoughts are too widely disperesed or numerous to organize.
• New solutions are needed to cirucumvent the more traditional ways of problem solving.
• Support for a solution is essential for successful implementation.

The team that creates this should be a multidisciplinary one and should have knowledge to evaluate various areas of the problem.  A six to eight member team is ideal.

Constructing an Affinity diagram involves four simple steps:

• Phrase the objective
• State the objective in a short, concise and generalized statement
• Record all responses
• Responses from brainstorming sessions are recorded on cards for easy review later on.
• Group the responses
• The response cards should sorted into related groups.  A card or word is choses than best describes each group.
• Organize groups in an affinity diagram.
• Lines are placed around each group of responses and related clusters are placed near each other with a connecting line.

The parts of the house of quality are described as follows:

1. The exterior walls of the house are the customer requirements.
2. On the left side is a listing of the voice of the customer, or what the customer expects in the product.
3. On the right side are the prioritized customer requirements, or planning matrix. Listed are items such as customer benchmarking, customer importance rating, target value, scale-up factor, and sales point.
4. The ceiling, or second floor, of the house contains the technical descriptors. Consistency of the product is provided through engineering characteristics, design constraints, and parameters.
5. The interior walls of the house are the relationships between customer requirements and technical descriptors. Customer expectations (customer requirements) are translated into engineering characteristics (technical descriptors).
6. The roof of the house is the interrelationship between technical descriptors. Tradeoffs between similar and/or conflicting technical descriptors are identified.
7. The foundation of the house is the prioritized technical descriptors. Items such as the technical benchmarking, degree of technical difficulty, and target value are listed.

What are the steps in building a House of Quality

1. Step 1—List Customer Requirements (WHATs)
2. Step 2—List Technical Descriptors (HOWs)
3. Step 3—Develop a Relationship Matrix between WHATs and HOWs
• Structuring An L-Shaped Diagram
• Relationship Matrix
• A double circle represents a strong relationship.
• The box is left blank if no relationship exists.
4. Step 4—Develop an Interrelationship Matrix between HOWs
• A double circle represents a strong positive relationship.
• A single circle represents a positive relationship.
• A single X represents a negative relationship.
• A double X represents a strong negative relationship.
5. Step 5—Competitive Assessments
• Customer Competitive Assessment
• Technical Competitive Assessment
6. Step 6—Develop Prioritized Customer Requirements
• Importance to Customer
• Target Value
• Scale-up Factor
• Sales Point
• Absolute Weight and Percent
7. Step 7—Develop Prioritized Technical Descriptors
• Degree of Difficulty
• Target Value
• Absolute Weight and Percent
• Relative Weight and Percent