Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Getting from the voice of the customer to technical design specifications

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Quality Function Deployment (QFD)Getting from
the voice of the customer to technical design
specifications
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Four Important Points to Understand Before
Implementation of QFD

• 1. No matter how well the design team thinks it
  understands the problem, it should employ the QFD
  method for all design projects. In the process
  the team will learn what it doesnt know about
  the problem.

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• 2. The customers requirements must be translated
  into measurable design targets. You cant design
  a car door that is easy to open when you dont
  know the meaning of the word easy.
• 3. The QFD method can be applied to the entire
  problem and/or any subproblem.

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• 4. It is important to worry about what needs to
  be designed and, only after this is fully
  understood, to worry about how the design will
  look and work.

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• Our cognitive capabilities generally lead us to
  try to assimilate the customers functional
  requirements (what is to be designed) in terms of
  form (how it will look) these images then become
  our favored designs and we get locked into them.
  The QFD procedure helps us to overcome this
  cognitive limitation.

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The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Technique

• 1. Identifying the Customer(s).
• 2. Determining Customer Requirements.
• 3. Prioritizing the Requirements.
• 4. Competition Benchmarking.
• 5. Translating the Customer Requirements into
  Measurable Engineering Requirements.

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Step 1 Identifying the Customer(s)

• Who is the customer?
• In addition to the person buying the product, the
  customers of the design engineer would also
  include the manufacturing and assembly engineers
  and workers. (or anyone else downstream of the
  design process).

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Step 2 Determining Customer Requirements

• The goal is to develop a list of all the customer
  requirements (made up in the customers own
  words) that will affect the design. This should
  be accomplished with the whole design team, based
  on the results of customer surveys.

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Step 3 Prioritizing the Requirements

• A weighting factor is generated for each
  requirement. The weighting factor will give the
  designer an idea of how much effort, time and
  money to invest in achieving each requirement.

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Two questions should be addressed in developing a
prioritization

• (1) To whom is the requirement important?
• (2) How is a measure of importance developed for
  this diverse group of requirements?

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Step 4 Competition Benchmarking

• The goal here is to determine how the customer
  perceives the competitions ability to meet each
  of the requirements. This forces awareness of
  what already exists and points out opportunities
  for improving upon that which already exists.
• Each competing product is compared with customer
  requirements. Some comparisons are objective and
  others are subjective.

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Step 5 Translating the Customer Requirements
into Measurable Engineering Requirements

• The goal here is to develop a set of engineering
  requirements (often called design specifications)
  that are measurable for use in evaluating the
  proposed designs.
• 1. transform the customer requirements into
  engineering requirements and
• 2. make sure that the engineering requirements
  are measurable.