? Analyze a manufacturing process and draw up plans for improved efficiency
? Plan and follow up QC inspections and diagnostic tests
? Plan and follow-up QC conferences and QC circle conferences.
The Voice of the Customers
Scherkenback (1986) notes that
We literally cannot be competitive in international markets unless we can operationally define our customer’s needs. In order to meet those needs and expectations at a price they are willing to pay, we must first know them.
The purpose of the voice of the customer within quality function deployment (QFD) is to know the customer’s expectations, voiced desires, and as yet unperceived turnons.
The purpose of QFD is to deploy the quality necessary to satisfy and even delight the customer. Thus, obtaining the voice of the customer is the focal point of the QFD process. If an inaccurate representation of customer desires is obtained, the QFD process will fine tune the system to bring forth the wrong product. What a waste! Thus, obtaining the voice of the customer accurately is critical for the proper application of QFD. Guess work will not do! You must ask the customer! To be accurate, scientific process is necessary!
Gustafsson (1993) provides the relationships between QFD and conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is one of the seven product planning tools which Japanese Society for Quality Control Product Planning Research Group recommends be used to determine the voice of the customer through a scientific process.
Barnard and Wallace (1994) integrate concepts from QFD and policy deployment into a process to deploy upper management strategy so that customer desires are met or exceeded. They also introduce the concept of choice modeling which appears to be a powerful means of determining the choice of the customer. Ultimately, it is the choice of the customer which determines whether or not the potential customers of the target market will actually buy the product or service.
Benefits of QFD
The main ‘process’ benefits of using QFD are:
? improved communication and sharing of information within a cross-functional team charged with developing a new product. This team will typically include people from a variety of functional groups, such as marketing, sales, service, distribution, product engineering, process engineering, procurement, and production
? the identification of ‘holes’ in the current knowledge of the design team
? the capture and display of a wide variety of important design information in one place in a compact form
? support for understanding, consensus, and decision making, especially when complex relationships and trade-offs are involved
? the creation of an informational base which is valuable for repeated cycles of product improvement
The main ‘bottom line’ benefits of using QFD are:
? greater likelihood of product success in the marketplace, due to the precise targeting of key customer requirements
? reduced overall design cycle time, mainly due to a reduction in time-consuming design changes. This is a powerful benefit: customer requirements are less likely to have changed since the beginning of the design project; and more frequent design cycles mean that products can be improved more rapidly than the competition
? reduced overall cost due to reducing design changes, which are not only time consuming but very costly, especially those which occur at a late stage.
? reduced product cost by eliminating redundant features and over-design.
The History of Quality Function Deployment
The creation of QFD is generally attributed to Mitsubishi’s Kobe shipyard in Japan. The original approach, conceived in the late 1960’s, was adopted and developed by other Japanese companies, notably Toyota and its suppliers. In 1986 a study by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) revealed that 54% of 148 member companies surveyed were using QFD. The sectors with the highest penetration of QFD were transportation (86%), construction (82%), electronics (63%), and precision machinery (66%). Many of the service companies surveyed (32%) were also using QFD. Specific design applications in Japan range from home appliances and clothing to retail outlets and apartment layouts.
In the USA the first serious exponents of QFD were the ‘big three’ automotive manufacturers in the 1980’s, and a few leading companies in other sectors such as electronics. However, the uptake of QFD in the Western world appears to have been fairly slow. There has been no survey comparable to the JUSE study regarding the spread of QFD in North America, and there are relatively few sources of literature and case studies, compared with other methodologies such as Benchmarking.
There is also some reluctance among users of QFD to publish and share information – much more so than with other quality-related methodologies. This may be because the data captured and the decisions made using QFD usually relate to future product plans, and are therefore sensitive, proprietary, and valuable to competitors.
CONCLUSION
Quality Function Deployment is a system engineering process which transforms the needs and requests of the customer/user into the specification required, at all project levels, to implement a high quality product. It also provides the necessary tie ups between all project levels, to tie it all together and to manage it. It is an excellent method for assuring that the customer obtains high value from your product, actually the intended purpose of QFD.
Quality, technology, Cost, and Reliability are the crucial elements of a good Quality Function Deployment.
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