Quality function deployment and House of Quality

Quality Function Deployment was developed by Yoji Akao in Japan in 1966. By 1972 the power of the approach had been well demonstrated at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Kobe Shipyard and in 1978 the first book on the subject was published in Japanese and then later translated into English in 1994. 

The QFD methodology can be used for both tangible products and non-tangible services, including manufactured goods, service industry, software products, IT projects, business process development, government, healthcare, environmental initiatives, and many other applications.

Goals

There are 3 main goals in implementing QFD :

1. Understand and prioritize customer needs.
2. Translate these needs into technical characteristics and specifications.
3. Build and deliver a quality product or service by focusing everybody on the customer.

The Quality Function Deployment Process

• Identify the Customers/stakeholders
• Determine Customer Requirements/Constraints
• Prioritize each requirement
• Competitive Benchmarking
• Translate Customer Requirements into measurable engineering specifications
• Set target values for each engineering 

Phases of Quality Function Deployment 

• Phase 1, Product Planning: It is building the House of Quality which is initiated by the marketing team, Phase 1 is also called The House of Quality. Many organizations only get through this phase of a QFD process. This phase documents customer requirements, warranty data, competitive opportunities, product measurements, competition for product measures, and the technical ability of the organization to meet each customer requirement. Getting good data from the customer in this phase is critical to the success of the entire QFD process.
• Phase 2, Product Design: This phase is initiated by the engineering department. Product design requires creativity and innovative team ideas. Product concepts (goals and objectives) are created during this phase and part of the specifications are documented. Parts that are determined to be most important to meet customer needs are then transferred into process planning or the next Phase.
• Phase 3, Process Planning: Process planning comes next and is owned by manufacturing engineering. During that, process planning, manufacturing processes, flowcharts and process parameters (Target Values) are documented.
• Phase 4, Process Control: finally, in production planning, performance indicators are created to monitor the production process, maintenance schedules, and skills training for operators. Also, in this phase decisions are made as to which process poses the most risk and controls are put in place to prevent   The quality assurance department in concert with manufacturing leads Phase 4.

The House of Quality

House of Quality is a diagram, resembling a house, used for defining the relationship between customer desires and needs, and the organization/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants to how the organization (that produces the products) is going to meet those wants.

House of Quality appeared in 1972 in the design of an oil tanker by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Akao has reiterated numerous times that a House of Quality is not QFD, it is just an example of one tool.