3.6 Tools: Quality Function Deployment

As you saw with many of the gurus’ concepts, the foundation of quality can be summarized by the motto: Get things right for the customer the first time. This means fulfilling customers’ needs and values.

How do you determine what the customer needs and values? For example, high-end German automobile manufacturers believed the U.S. market wanted vehicles that performed and handled well. While they were correct that those were important factors, they overlooked that Americans placed a high value on amenities such as cupholders in their cars. While this was not likely a deal-breaker for most people buying luxury, performance automobiles, the quality process would have identified the need to add cupholders to these vehicles sooner.

The concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) came from Japan in the 1960s. It is a deliberate methodology used to identify the true needs of the customer. It is often said that QFD listens to the “voice of the customer.” Not surprisingly, like many things in the quality literature, QFD is a structured process to collect, organize, and prioritize the customer requirements against the firm’s capabilities. In short, QFD will analyze the customer’s satisfaction with a product or service and help the company determine appropriate plans to improve the organization’s process.

To conduct QFD, the most widely used tool is the “House of Quality” model. Figure 3.8 is an example House of Quality model from the ASQ. You can see the model’s shape resembles a house, hence the name. The model is important because it analyzes several things to help the organization understand both customers’ needs and the company’s internal and external positions to meet those needs. For example, on the left, you see customer requirements (also known as the “whats”) that are considered important are listed.

In this example, they are then weighted for importance. Using our German automaker example, handling and cupholders would be on the list. Still, handling would likely be a substantial weighting with cupholders carrying a medium weight for the USA and a weak weight for Europe. Across the top (i.e., measurement time, accuracy, built-in, and so on) are the “hows”: how the company will meet the customer requirements to the left.

The intersecting rows and columns are where the interrelationships between the whats and hows are put into a relationship matrix. This is the most crucial part of the QFD. The remaining parts help to prioritize and rank options. For example, the right side benchmarks our firm (#1) against our competitors (#2–4) for the items in the relationship matrix. Also, the pyramid at the top helps to prioritize where your efforts should be to solve any issues. Finally, the area at the bottom is used to assign additional weights and help prioritize options and compare to competitors’ processes. While a more complete description of QFD could fill an entire book, this brief look should help you recognize what a QFD House of Quality looks like and give you some understanding of how to read it.

To summarize, QFD is a good tool for better understanding customers’ needs and prioritizing improvements within your organization to address customer requirements. However, it can be a challenge for some companies to implement. Often, it requires a company to dramatically change how it collects information and operates. Also, QFD requires continuous customer contact to gather data, which can be costly, intrusive, and lead to poor decisions. Furthermore, if a company improperly collects data in the QFD, it may align resources to the wrong priorities. Finally, QFD assumes that the customer knows what they want; this is not always the case.

For some products, customers don’t know what they want until they get it. Imagine explaining to customers about breakthrough technologies or changes in products. It would be best if you tried to visualize surveying customers who have never seen new technologies we take for granted today, such as intermittent windshield wipers or a camera in a smartphone. How would you respond if someone asked you how important it would be to have a tablet or iPad that you can roll up or float on water? QFD works very well for incremental improvements on existing products or services. It is a great tool that most companies and organizations will benefit from employing to understand their customers better.