Quality Function Deployment
QFD is a structured approach to defining customer needs or requirements and translating them into specific plans to produce products to meet those needs. The “voice of the customer” is the term to describe these stated and unstated customer needs or requirements.
QFD is:
- Understanding Customer Requirements
- Quality Systems Thinking + Psychology + Knowledge/Epistemology
- Maximizing Positive Quality That Adds Value
- Comprehensive Quality System for Customer Satisfaction
- Strategy to Stay Ahead of The Game
As a quality system that implements elements of Systems Thinking with elements of Psychology and Epistemology (knowledge), QFD provides a system of comprehensive development process for:
- Understanding ‘true’ customer needs from the customer’s perspective
- What ‘value’ means to the customer, from the customer’s perspective
- Understanding how customers or end users become interested, choose, and are satisfied
- Analyzing how do we know the needs of the customer
Deciding what features to include - Determining what level of performance to deliver
- Intelligently linking the needs of the customer with design, development, engineering, manufacturing, and service functions
- Intelligently linking Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) with the front end Voice of Customer analysis and the entire design system
- There are many approaches to QFD, depending on the strategic purpose of the project.
The 3 main goals in implementing QFD are:
- Prioritize spoken and unspoken customer wants and needs.
- Translate these needs into technical characteristics and specifications.
- Build and deliver a quality product or service by focusing everybody toward customer satisfaction.
Processes of QFD
According to Lockamy and Khurana (1995) , the idea of QFD is timing, performance evaluation, and resource commitment. And the four phases of QFD are:
1. Product concept planning. It starts with customers and market research with leads to product plans, ideas, sketches, concept models, and marketing plans.
2. Product development and specification. It would lead to the development to prototypes and tests.
3. Manufacturing processes and production tools. They are designed based on the product and component specifications.
4. Production of product. It starts after the pilot have been resolved.
Each phase, or matrix, represents a more specific aspect of the product’s requirements. Relationships between elements are evaluated for each phase. Only the most important aspects from each phase are deployed into the next matrix.
