Chapter 16. QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT
Definition:
- Quality – can be defined as meeting customer needs and providing superior value.
- Function – a special or typical work or purpose of a thing or person.
- Deployment – an act of organizing and sending out people or things to be used for a particular purpose.
- Quality Function Deployment
- A method for developing a design quality aimed at satisfying the customer and then translating the customer’s demands into design targets and major quality assurance points to be used throughout the production phase.
- It is a structured approach to defining customer needs or requirements and translating them into specific plans to produce products to meet the needs.
- It is a technique to record every requirement expressed by the customer and take a conscious decision on the voice of the customers.
- It is a list of what the customer wants in the product or service.
The “voice of the customers” represents the requirements of the customers. It describes the stated and unstated customer needs or requirements.
- House of Quality – the primary tool for QFD. It is also known as product planning matrix or matrix diagram. It is an excellent quality-planning tool.
Introduction
The success of business is becoming more and more customer driven. It has become very important to meet the real and the latest needs of the customers to be successful in the market place as organizations realize the importance of customer delight, they trust QFD as the only solution plan to cogitate products and services to meet the customer’s current and future, seated and stated needs. It is recognizes as the right methodology for ensuring that voice of customer is taken note and efforts of the entire organizations are directed towards it.
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Four Phases Approach of QFD[pic 5][pic 6][pic 7]
Product Planning Assembly / Part Process Planning Process Quality
Deployment Control
Benefits of QFD
- Reduces product development time up to 50%
- Design cycle time should shortened by 30 to 50%
- Start up and engineering costs reduce by 20 to 60%
- Reduces time to market
- Focuses the organization on customer needs
- Useful for gathering customer requirement
- Design quality improves
- Improved performance of products
- Improves communication within the organization about customer needs
- Helps in identification of conflicting requirements and solving them
- Improves customer satisfaction and thereby increasing sales
- Reduces rework
- Reduced warranty and field service costs
- Reduction of quality costs
- Enables concurrent engineering
- Enables understanding of competitors and hence identification of competitive advantages of their products and also their weaknesses
- Since most of the requirements are clearly understood, the requirement changes are few. A boon to the software industry.
The advantages should motivate every organization to invest employee time to get such high returns.
QFD Team
QFD team of six to eight persons has to be constituted for every project. It should be a cross-functional team consisting of representatives of the following functions:
- Marketing Sales
- Design
- Production
- QA
- Testing
- Purchase
- Vendors, etc.
The team should have a senior employee as moderator or facilitator. The team members should be able to spend the required time for successful completion of the project. They should meet for about two hours in each sitting. The QFD task is carried out for design of a new product as well as improvement of an existing product. By and large, the Japanese use QFD for improving existing products whereas the Americans use it for design of new products.
The Voice of the Customer
QFD is a technique to record every requirement expressed by the customer and take conscious decision about the customer. The starting point in QFD is finding the customer requirements of a product or service from the number of formal and informal channels.