QUALITY FUNCTION

DEPLOYMENT (QFD)
ROSHAN
201550703
What’s QFD?
QFD is a planning tool used to fulfill customer expectations. It is a
disciplined approach to product design, engineering and production and provides in
depth evaluation of a product. If implemented correctly the engineering knowledge,
productivity and quality can be improved thereby reducing costs, product
development time.
QFD focusses on customer expectations or requirements often referred
to as voice of the customer. It is used to translate customers specific requirements
into engineering and technical characteristics and it can be deployed through:

• Product planning
• Part development
• Process planning
• Production planning
• Service industries
 QFD is a team based management tool in which customer expectations
are used to drive the product development process. Conflicting characteristics or
requirements are identified early in the QFD process and can be resolved before
production.

Confusion and mis interpretation are also a problem while a product

moves from marketing to design to engineering to manufacturing. Instead of
working on what the customer expects, work is concentrated on fixing what the
customer doesn't want (i.e) it is not productive to improve something the customer
didn’t want.

Quality Function Deployment enables the design phase to concentrate

on the customer requirements, thereby spending less time on redesign which is a
muda and on modifications.
The QFD team
When an organisation decides to implement QFD, the project manager
and team members need to be able to commit a significant amount of time to it,
especially in early stages. The priorities of the projects need to be defined and told
to all departments.
There are two types of teams-designing a new product or improving an
existing product. Teams are composed of members from marketing, design, quality,
finance and production. Using inter team communication to its fullest extent will
alleviate unforeseen problems and make the project run smoothly.

Benefits of QFD
QFD was originally implemented to reduce start up costs.
Organizations using QFD have reported a reduced product development time.
Product quality and consequently customer satisfaction improve with QFD due to
numerous factors depicted in the following figure.,
 Creates focus on customer requirements
Uses competitive information effectively
Improves customer
Prioritizes resources
satisfaction
Identifies items that can be acted upon
Structures resident experience/information
Decreases midstream design changes
Limits post introduction problems
Reduces
Avoids future development redundancies
Implementation time
Identifies future application opportunities
Surfaces missing assumptions
Based on consensus
Creates communication at interfaces
Promotes teamwork
Identifies action at interfaces
Creates global view out of detail
Documents rationale for designs
Is easy to assimilate
Provides
Adds structure to the information
documentation
Adapts to changes (a living document)
Provides framework for sensitivity analysis
Types of customer information and how to collect it?

Solicited, measurable and routine data are found out by customer

surveys, market surveys and trade trials; working with preferred customers;
analysing products from other manufacturers; and buying back products from field.
This information tells an organisation’s performance in current market.

Unsolicited, measurable, and routine data tend to make the form of

customer complaints or lawsuits. This information is generally disliked; however it
provides valuable learning information.

Solicited, subjective and routine data are usually gathered from focus
groups. The object of these focus groups is to find out the likes, dislikes, trends and
opinions about current and future products.
Solicited Unsolicited

Quantitative Qualitative

Structured Random

Focus Trade visits

groups Customer visit
Consultants
Complaint reports
Organisations standards
Government regulations Sales force
Lawsuits Training programs
Hot lines Conventions
Surveys Trade journals
Customer tests Trade shows
Trade trials Vendors
Preferred customers Suppliers
OM testing Academic
Product purchase survey Employees
Customer audits
 Solicited, subjective and haphazard data are usually gathered from
trade visits, customer visits and independent consultants. These type of data can be
very useful; however, they can also be misleading, depending on the quantity and
frequency of information.

Unsolicited, subjective and haphazard data are typically obtained from

conventions, vendors, suppliers and employees. This information is very valuable
and often relates the true voice of the customer.

Organization of information:

Now the customer expectations and needs have been identified and
researched, the QFD team needs to process the information. Numerous methods
include affinity diagrams, interrelationships diagrams, tree diagrams and cause and
effect diagrams. Affinity diagram is the most preferred one.
HOUSE OF QUALITY

The primary planning tool used in the QFD is the house of quality. It
translates the voice of the customer into design requirements that meet specific
target values and matches those against how an organization will meet those
requirements. Many managers and engineers consider the house of quality to be the
primary chart in quality planning.

QFD as FRAMEWORK of HOUSE

The parts of house of quality are described as below;

 The exterior walls of the house are the customer requirements. On the left side is a listing of the voice of the
customer, or what the customer expects in the product. On the right side are the prioritized customer requirements,
or planning matrix. Listed are items such as customer benchmarking, customer importance rating, target value,
sale-up factor and sales point.

 The ceiling, or 2nd floor, of the house contains the technical descriptors. Consistency of the product is provided
through engineering characteristics, design constrains and parameters.

 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).

 The roof of the house is the interrelationship between technical descriptors. Trade-offs between similar and/or
conflicting technical descriptors are identified.

 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.

This is the basic structure for the house of quality: once this format is understood, any other QFD
matrices are fairly straightforward.
Building a House of Quality:

Basic House of Quality

Matrix
Step 1-List Customer Requirements (WHATs):
This list is often referred as the WHATs that a customer needs or
expects in a particular product. This list of primary customer requirements is usually
vague and very general in nature. Finally the list of customer requirements is
divided into a hierarchy of primary, secondary and tertiary customer requirements.
Step 2-List Technical Descriptors (HOWs):
The customer needs and expectations have been expressed in terms of
customer requirements, the QFD team must come up with engineering
characteristics or technical descriptors (HOWs) that will affect one or more of the
customer requirements. This technical descriptors make up the ceiling, or 2 nd floor,
of the house of quality. Each of the customer requirements is broke down into the
next level of detail by listing one or more primary technical descriptors for each of
the tertiary customer requirements. This process is similar to refining marketing
specifications into system-level engineering specifications. This process of
refinement is continued until every item on the list is actionable. Finally, the list of
technical descriptors is divided into a hierarchy of primary, secondary and tertiary
technical descriptors.
Step 3-Develop a Relationship Matrix Between WHATs and HOWs:
Tracing the relationships between the customer requirements and
technical descriptors can become very confusing, because each customer
requirement may affect more than one technical descriptor and vice versa.

Structuring an L-shaped diagram:

One way to reduce the confusion associated with determining the

relationships between customer requirements and technical descriptors is to use an
L-shaped matrix. It’s a 2D relationship that shows the intersection of related pairs of
items, is constructed by turning the list of technical descriptors perpendicular to the
list of customer requirements.
Relationship Matrix:

The relationship matrix is used to represent graphically the degree of

influence between each technical descriptor and each customer requirement. Doing
this early in the development process will shorten the development cycle and lessen
the need for future changes. It’s common to use symbols to represent the degree of
relationship between the customer requirements and technical descriptors. This
method allows very complex relationships to be depicted and interpreted with very
little experience.

After the relationship matrix has been completed, it is evaluated for

empty rows and columns. An empty row indicates that a customer requirement is
not being addressed by any of the technical descriptors. An column indicates that a
particular technical descriptor doesn’t affect any of the customer requirements.
Step 4-Develop an Inter relationship Matrix Between HOWs:

The roof of the house of quality, called the correlation matrix, is used
to identify any inter relationships between each of the technical descriptors. The
correlation matrix is a triangular table attached to the technical descriptors.

The symbols describe the direction of the correlation. In other words, a

strong +ve interrelationship, a strong –ve interrelationship would be a nearly
perfectly negative correlation. Conflicting technical descriptors are extremely
important because they are frequently the result of conflicting customer
requirements and, consequently, represent points at which trade-offs must be made.
Trade-offs that are not identified and resolved while often lead to unfilled
requirements, engineering changes, increased costs, and poorer quality.
Step 5-Competitive Assessments:
The competitive assessments are a pair of weighted tables (or graphs)
the depict item for item how competitive products compare with current
organization products. The competitive assessment tables are separated into 2
categories, Customer Assessment and Technical Assessment.

Customer Competitive Assessment:

The customer competitive assessment is the block of columns

corresponding to each customer requirement in the house of quality on the right side
of the relationship matrix. The numbers 1 through 5 are listed in the competitive
evaluation column to indicate a rating of 1for worst and 5 for best. It’s a good way
to determine if the customer requirements have been met and identify areas to
concentrate on the next design.
Technical Competitive Assessment:
The technical competitive assessment makes up a block of rows
corresponding to each technical descriptor in the house of quality beneath the
relationship matrix. Similar to the competitive assessment, the test data are
converted to the numbers 1 through 5, which are listed in the competitive evaluation
row to indicate a rating, 1 for worst and 5 for best. The ranking can then be entered
below each technical descriptor using the same number as used in customer
competitive assessment.

The technical competitive assessment is often useful in covering gaps

in engineering judgement. If and organization’s technical assessment shows it’s
product to be superior to the competition, then the customer assessment should
show superior assessment. If the customer disagrees, then a mistake in engineering
judgement has occurred and should be corrected.
Both assessments are very important,
because they give the organization an
understanding on where it’s product
stand in relationship to the market.
Step 6-Develop Prioritized Customer Requirements:
The prioritized customer requirements make up a block of columns
corresponding to each customer requirement in house of quality on the right side of
the customer competitive assessment. These prioritized customer requirements
contains columns for importance to customer, target value, scale-up factor, sales
point and an absolute weight.

Importance to Customer:

The QFD team-or, preferably, the focus of group-each customer

requirement by assigning it a rating. Numbers 1 through 10 are listed in the
importance to customer column to indicate a rating of 1 for least important and 10
for very important. In other words, the more important the customer requirement,
the higher the rating.
Target value:
The target-value column is on the same scale as the customer
competitive assessment (1 for worst, 5 for best can be used). This column is where
the QFD team decides whether they want to keep their product unchanged, improve
the product, or make the product better than the competition.

Scale-up factor:
The scale-up factor is the ratio of the largest value to the product rating
given in the customer competitive assessment. The higher the number, the more
effort is needed.

Sales point:
The sales point tells the QFD team how well the customer requirement
will sell. The objective here is to promote the best customer requirement and any
remaining customer requirements that will help in the sale of the product.
Absolute weight:
Finally, the absolute weight is calculated by multiplying importance to
the customer, scale-up factor and sales point:

Absolute weight=(importance to customer)(scale-up factor)(sales point),

After summing all the absolute weights a person and rank for each customer
requirement can be determined. The weight can then be used as a guide for the
planning phase of the product development.

Step 7-Develop Prioritized Technical Descriptors:

The prioritized technical descriptors makeup a block of rows

corresponding to each technical descriptor in the house of quality below the
technical competitive assessment. These prioritized technical descriptors contain
degree of technical difficulty, target value, absolute weight and relative weights.
Degree of Difficulty:
The degree of technical difficulty, when used, helps to evaluate the
ability to implement certain quality improvement.

Target value:
A target value for each technical descriptor is also included below the
degree of technical difficulty. How much it takes to meet or exceed the customer’s
expectations is answered by evaluating all the information entered into the house of
quality and selecting target values.

Absolute weight:
The last two rows of the prioritized technical descriptors are the
absolute weight and relative weight.
Relative weight:

In a similar manner, the relative weight for both the j th technical

descriptor is then given by replacing the degree of importance for the customer
requirements with the absolute weight for customer requirements.

Higher absolute and relative ratings identify areas where engineering

efforts need to be concentrated. They can be organised into a Pareto diagram to
show which technical characteristics are important in meeting customer
requirements.
QFD process:

The QFD matrix (house of quality) is the basis for all future matrices
needed for this method. Although each house of quality chart now contains a large
amount of information, it’s still necessary to refine the technical descriptors further
until an actionable level of detail is achieved. The process is accomplished by
creating a new chart. This process continues until each objective is refined to an
actionable level.

The HOW MUCH (prioritized technical descriptors) values are usually

carried along to the next chart to facilitate communication. This action ensures that
target values are not lost during the QFD process. If the target values are changed,
then the product is not meeting the customer requirements and not listening to the
voice of the customer, which defeats the purpose of QFD.
Numerous other house of quality planning charts can be used to improve quality
and customer satisfaction.

An example of the QFD approach can be found in the corrosion problems

with Japanese cars of 1960s and 1970s that resulted in large warranty expenses. It
was determined that this could be obtained by ensuring part-quality characteristics,
which include a minimum paint film build and maximum surface treatment crystal
size.

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