Quality function deployment

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Image:A1 House of Quality.png

Quality function deployment or "QFD" is a flexible and comprehensive group decision making technique used in product or service development, brand marketing, and product management. QFD can strongly help an organization focus on the critical characteristics of a new or existing product or service from the separate viewpoints of the customer market segments, company, or technology-development needs. The results of the technique yields transparent and visible graphs and matrices that can be reused for future product/service developments.

QFD transforms customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering characteristics of a product of service, prioritizing each product/service characteristic while simultaneouly setting development targets for product or service development. An allied technique, called Pugh Concept Selection can then be used in coordination with QFD to select a promising product or service configuration from among listed alternatives. QFD is applied in a wide variety of services, consumer products, military needs (such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter-- see [1]), and emerging technology products. The technique is also used to identify and document competitive marketing strategies and tactics (see example QFD House of Quality for Enterprise Product Development, at right). QFD is considered a key practice of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) as seen at QFD/DFSS Roadmap. It is also implicated in the new ISO 9000:2000 standard which focuses on customer satisfaction.

Template:TOCleft Acquiring market needs by listening to the Voice of Customer (VOC), sorting the needs, and numerically prioritizing them (using techniques such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process) are the early tasks in QFD. Traditionally, going to the Gemba (the "real place" where value is created for the customer) is where these customer needs are evidenced and compiled. A Flash tutorial showing the build process of the traditional QFD "House of Quality" (HOQ) can be found at: QFD Flash Tutorial . (Although this example may violate QFD principles, the basic sequence of HOQ building are illustrative.) While many books and articles on "how to do QFD" are available, there is a relative paucity of example matrices available. It has been noted that QFD matrices become highly proprietary due to the high density of product or service information found therein. Notable U.S. companies using QFD techniques include the U.S. automobile manufacturers (GM, Ford, Daimler Chrysler) and their suppliers, IBM, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and many others.

Since its early use in the United States, QFD met with initial enthusiasm then plummeting popularity when it was discovered that much time could be wasted if poor group decision making techniques were employed. Organizational culture/corporate culture has an effect on the ability to change organizational human processes and on the sustainability of the changes. In particular, in organizations exhibiting strong cultural norms and rich sets of tacit assumptions that prevent objective discussion of historical courses of action, QFD may be resisted due to its ability to expose tacit assumptions and unspoken rules. See Organizational culture and Edgar Schein. It has been suggested that a learning organization can more easily overcome these issues due to the more transparent nature of the organizational culture and to the readiness of the membership to discuss relevant cultural norms. Since the early introduction of QFD, the technique has been developed to shorten the time span and reduce the required group efforts (such as "Blitz QFD®"). Tools such as online survey software can be used to gather qualitative customer feedback and prioritize the needs. Subsequently, those needs may be "flowed" into a HOQ and studied through a myriad of supporting templates or "deployments".

Results of QFD analysis have been applied in Japan and elsewhere into deploying the high-impact controllable factors in Strategic planning and Strategic management (also known as Hoshin Planning or Policy Deployment). This technique somewhat resembles Management by objectives (MBO), but adds a significant element in the goal setting process, called "catchball". Use of these Hoshin techniques by U.S. companies such as Hewlett Packard have been successful in focusing and aligning company resources to follow stated strategic goals throughout an organizational hierarchy.

While originally developed for manufacturing industries, interest in the use of QFD-based ideas in software development is gaining, for example in Object-oriented programming (Lamia 1995) and use case driven software development (Denney 2005). See also Richard Zultner's Blitz QFD.

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History

QFD was originally developed by Drs. Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno in the early 1960s. The first published article was in 1966 by Mr. Oshiumi of Bridgestone Tire. Initially using simple diagrams based on the "fishbone" more complex products such as ocean going ships required more powerful analytic tools. Multiple fishbones were first organized into a spreadsheet-type matrix at Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's Kobe Shipyard in 1972, by Mr. Koichi Nishimura. An earlier technique, the Ishikawa diagram or "fishbone" diagram, was initially used for this task, albeit using a reversal of the original fishbone technique. Instead of extracting cause from observed process effects (such as in statistical process control), the fishbone diagram was "turned around" to first identify product/service needs (the "WHATs"), then the "HOWs" or fishbones of the diagram were used to develop needed process or product characteristics. The Ishikawa diagram was eventually replaced by the QFD matrix methods which were more flexible and adapted to numeric treatment. The use of the term WHAT and HOW was introduced by Mr. Harold Ross of General Motors in the mid 1980s as a way to simplify teaching the method. Since the data that goes in the axes of the matrices constantly changes and rotates, these terms have actually led to misunderstanding and poor implementation. Mr. Ross has since apologized.

Notable improvements in the original method have been promulgated by Larry Sullivan and Bob King in the U.S. These improvements and extensions include Matrix of Matrices and Four-Phase QFD. Dr. Akao never approved of these "Americanizations" because they reduced QFD to a cookbook mentality instead of the dynamic approach he intended. In 2000, he instructed the QFD Institute [2] to modernize QFD and its training. These approaches can be viewed from the standpoint of the Kano model. It has been observed that the mixture of differing Kano customer-needs types (i.e., basic, one-dimensional, exciter) in the QFD diagrams can lead to numeric difficulties within a row or a column of the QFD matrix. This is the result of a common misconception because the Kano model actually addresses product features and not customer needs. Matrix of Matrices and comprehensive QFD can alleviate many of these difficulties, e.g., avoiding the mixing of cost, reliability, safety needs in the same matrix as product or service function.

These techniques extend the original HOQ approach by deploying resulting "HOWs" from the top-level HOQ into lower tier matrices addressing aspects of product development, such as cost, technology, reliability.

In addition, the same technique can extend the method into the constituent product subsystems, configuration items, assemblies, and parts. From these detail level components, fabrication and assembly process QFD charts can be developed to support statistical process control techniques.

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See also

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References

  • Akao, Y. (1990) Quality Function Deployment: Integrating Customer Requirements into Product Design. Productivity Press. ISBN 0-915299-41-0. [Translated by Glenn Mazur.]
  • Cohen, Lou, Quality function deployment : how to make QFD work for you, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0201633302
  • Denney, Richard (2005) Succeeding with Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality. Addison-Wesley Professional Publishing. ISBN 0-321-31643-6. Discusses QFD in context of use case driven development.
  • Lamia, Walter. 1995. “Integrating QFD with Object-oriented Software Design Methodologies.” Presented at the 7th Symposium on QFD.
  • Mizuno, Shigeru and Yoji Akao. (1994) QFD: The Customer-Driven Approach to Quality Planning & Deployment. Productivity Press. ISBN 9283311221. [Translated by Glenn Mazur.]
  • ReVelle, Jack B., The QFD handbook, Wiley, ISBN 0471173819
  • Sullivan, L. (1986) Quality Function Deployment, Quality Progress, June 1986, pp 39-50, ISSN 0033-524Xar:كيو أف دي

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