Quality Function
Deployment - QFD
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
yield transparent and visible graphs and matrices that can be reused
for future product/service developments. 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 has been adopted by several corporations and organizations. For
example, the QFD Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to
dissemination and advancement of QFD through on-going R&D, current best
practices and tools, and education programs.
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.
QFD transforms customer
needs (the voice of the customer ) into engineering characteristics
(and appropriate test methods) of a product or service, prioritizing
each product/service characteristic while simultaneously setting development
targets for product or service development.
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.
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.
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