Quality Function Deployment
Visual decision-making procedure used by cross-functional project teams. This allows the team to develop a unified assessment of customer requests and achieve common consensus on the final technical specifications of the product. Using this technique helps avoid lengthy decision-making processes and costly project revisions.
To pursue market success, in addition to meeting launch deadlines (competitive time to market) and having the features required by the market, a product must be of QUALITY.
Quality is the measure by which a product or service fulfills the functions expected by the customer.
Quality Function Deployment is a methodology that focuses on aspects that pursue customer satisfaction, in order to establish upstream the quality that must be ensured, starting from the first phase of the engineering process.
QFD forces the systematic connection of product features to customer needs (VoC: Voice of the Customer) and requires different company competencies to interact with each other.
QFD is a tool that allows the translation of “fitness for use” into “conformance to specifications,” identifying the priorities of characteristics in order to obtain a product that satisfies the customer.
Some considerations on QFD:
- The use of QFD should disregard, at least initially, economic considerations of the product (concepts of cost and value).
- Opportunities should be sought where there is high customer interest and low competition. Negative correlations between ECs should be eliminated or at least reduced.
- Success depends heavily on the ability to engage and get a group of people to work together (using classic project management methods) who have specific individual knowledge and experiences, and are customer-oriented.
The advantages of QFD:
- Quality Improvement
- Cost reduction in design and production
- Increased product reliability
- Reduction of decision and planning time
- Reduction of warranty claims
- Best marketing opportunities
- More customer-oriented workforce
