Quality Function Deployment has been defined as 'a system for translating consumer requirements into appropriate company requirements at each stage from research and product development to engineering and manufacturing to marketing/sales and distribution (American Supplier Institute, 1989). QFD is taking the voice of the customer from the beginning of product development and deploying it throughout the firm through a sequence of phases. In QFD, the voice of customer aligns the company's resources to focus on maximizing customer satisfaction and minimising waste. QFD is not just a quality tool, it is also a planning tool for developing new products and improving existing products.
QFD permits the 'voice of the customer', rather than the 'demands of managements', to allocate company resources and to coordinate skills and functions in producing the final product. Benefits of listening to the customer requires that the management works to gain an understanding of its customers at three levels. The first level is understanding the basic wants and needs of the customer. A Cross-functional team using a variety of market research methods (e.g. individual interviews, focus groups and mail and telephone surveys) generates a list of customer requirements. The information collected during this stage is referred to as the 'spoken' quality demands and performance expectations. The requirements are usually vague (e..g. 'good ride') or incomplete and must be further defined into measurable characteristics. There is also information which is not directly given by the customer but must be included in the analysis to obtain a more complete understanding of customer requirements. The 'unspoken' attributes are often overlooked by the customer or assumed to be incorporated into the product (e.g. airplane arrives safely). The product must fulfill all these basic requriements, along with attaining high levels of performance in order to achieve a competitive level of customer satisfaction.
Second, QFD must drive the company to go beyond these data collection techniques and identify fundamental customer needs and root product function. In addition to the spoken and implied wants of the customer, QFD forces the design team to determine hidden customer requirements by studying how customers use a product, examining the product's applications and learning customer behaviors. For example, customers may express a desire to have the bank offer more covenient hours. One response would be to open the bank for longer hours. Another would be to be offer access to its services via a computer network and automated teller machines.
Third, in addition to learning the basic quality and performance attributes and root product functions, the product must provide unexpected features which 'excite and delight' the customer in order to sustain long term market share. These features are not usually known by the customer because they are either not aware of technological advances (e.g. new laser applications) or have become accustomed to standard product uses or application. While some new characterstics have evolved from technological breakthrough, no all new features must come through research and development. 'New' features or product applications are found when time is spent understanding the customer and how the product is being used. As new features are introduced and competitors copy or surpass existing products or services, characterstics which one surprised the customer, become standard product features over time (e.g. air bags in automobiles). Hence, the list of product characteristics must be continually updated and revised.
Briefly discuss the concept
The team must examine the matrix to determine which technical requirement will need design attention, and the costs of that attention will be given in the bottom row. If certain technical costs become a major issue, the pretties may then be change. It will be clear form the central matrix, if there is more than one way to achieve a particular customer requirement, and the roof matrix will show if the technical requirements to achieve one customer requirement will have a negative effect on another technical issue.
The very bottom of the house of quality diagram shows the target values of the technical characteristics, which are expressed in physical terms. They can only be decided by the team after discussion of the complete house contents. While these targets are the physical output of the QFD exercise, the whole process of information-gathering, structuring and ranking generates a tremendous improvement in the team's cross-functional understanding of the product/service design delivery system. The target technical characteristics may be used to generate the next level house of quality diagram, where they become the WHATs, and the QFD process determines the further details of HOW they are to be achieved. In this way the process 'deploys' the customer requirements all the way to the final operational stages. Figures shows how the target technical characteristics at each level become the inputs to the next level matrix.
House of Quality___________________________________________
QFD was first put forth in 1966 in Quality Assurance work done by Prof. Yoji Akao and Mr.
Oshiumi of Bridgestone Tire.
Its purpose was to show the connections between true quality, quality characteristics, and process
characteristics. This was done using the Fishbone Diagram, with true quality in the heads and
quality and process characteristics in the bones.
For more complex products, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry Kobe Shipyards combined these many
fishbones into a matrix.
In 1979, Mr. Sawada of Toyota Auto Body used the matrix in a reliability study which permitted
him to address technical trade-offs in the quality characteristics. This was done by adding a
"roof to the top of the matrix, which he then dubbed the "House of Quality."
Components of House of Quality______________________
The House of Quality is actually an assembly of other deployment hierarchic
and tables.
These include the Demanded Quality Hierarchy (rows), Quality
Characteristics Hierarchy (columns), the relationships matrix which relates
them using any one of several distribution methods, the Quality Planning
Table (right side room), and Design Planning Table (bottom room).
Many people, who haphazardly learned QFD some 20 years ago and failed
update their knowledge since then, refer to these rooms by undifferentiated terms sucn as wnats,
Hows, etc. (Sadly, this include many book authors, professors, and consultants.) This is not a
wise way to do QFD because it limits your ability to apply QFD only in the most elementary
form. It could be even detrimental for today's businesses that operate in complex environments.
It is recommended that such terms be abandoned and that users refer to the actual data by name.
This makes sense when there are multiple matrices used and proper naming conventions add
clarity to the process
The Myth About The House of Quality______________________________
Most interesting is that in many QFD studies, the House of Quality (HOQ) is not the starting point and can even be unnecessary.
That "the House of Quality is the QFD" is a myth that is still propagated by many people and books of outdated QFD knowledge, unfortunately, even though Dr. Yoji Akao (founder of QFD) has repeatedly warned it is not so by itself._______________________________
The team must examine the matrix to determine which technical requirement will need design attention, and the costs of that attention will be given in the bottom row. If certain technical costs become a major issue, the pretties may then be change. It will be clear form the central matrix, if there is more than one way to achieve a particular customer requirement, and the roof matrix will show if the technical requirements to achieve one customer requirement will have a negative effect on another technical issue.
The very bottom of the house of quality diagram shows the target values of the technical characteristics, which are expressed in physical terms. They can only be decided by the team after discussion of the complete house contents. While these targets are the physical output of the QFD exercise, the whole process of information-gathering, structuring and ranking generates a tremendous improvement in the team's cross-functional understanding of the product/service design delivery system. The target technical characteristics may be used to generate the next level house of quality diagram, where they become the WHATs, and the QFD process determines the further details of HOW they are to be achieved. In this way the process 'deploys' the customer requirements all the way to the final operational stages. Figures shows how the target technical characteristics at each level become the inputs to the next level matrix.
House of Quality___________________________________________
QFD was first put forth in 1966 in Quality Assurance work done by Prof. Yoji Akao and Mr.
Oshiumi of Bridgestone Tire.
Its purpose was to show the connections between true quality, quality characteristics, and process
characteristics. This was done using the Fishbone Diagram, with true quality in the heads and
quality and process characteristics in the bones.
For more complex products, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry Kobe Shipyards combined these many
fishbones into a matrix.
In 1979, Mr. Sawada of Toyota Auto Body used the matrix in a reliability study which permitted
him to address technical trade-offs in the quality characteristics. This was done by adding a
"roof to the top of the matrix, which he then dubbed the "House of Quality."
Components of House of Quality______________________
The House of Quality is actually an assembly of other deployment hierarchic
and tables.
These include the Demanded Quality Hierarchy (rows), Quality
Characteristics Hierarchy (columns), the relationships matrix which relates
them using any one of several distribution methods, the Quality Planning
Table (right side room), and Design Planning Table (bottom room).
Many people, who haphazardly learned QFD some 20 years ago and failed
update their knowledge since then, refer to these rooms by undifferentiated terms sucn as wnats,
Hows, etc. (Sadly, this include many book authors, professors, and consultants.) This is not a
wise way to do QFD because it limits your ability to apply QFD only in the most elementary
form. It could be even detrimental for today's businesses that operate in complex environments.
It is recommended that such terms be abandoned and that users refer to the actual data by name.
This makes sense when there are multiple matrices used and proper naming conventions add
clarity to the process
The Myth About The House of Quality______________________________
Most interesting is that in many QFD studies, the House of Quality (HOQ) is not the starting point and can even be unnecessary.
That "the House of Quality is the QFD" is a myth that is still propagated by many people and books of outdated QFD knowledge, unfortunately, even though Dr. Yoji Akao (founder of QFD) has repeatedly warned it is not so by itself._______________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment