Preloader

Quality Function Deployment

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a structured approach to defining customer needs or requirements and translating them into specific plans to produce products to meet those needs.
  • The Quality Functional Deployment is built on the fundamentals of Matrix Diagram to identify the strengths of What’s & How’s
  • The “voice of the customer” is the term to describe these stated and unstated customer needs or requirements.
  • This understanding of the customer needs is then summarized in a product planning matrix or “house of quality”

QFD: Step 1 – Voice of Customer

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • In Step 1, Voice of the Customer information that has been collected, sorted, and developed is entered on the left side of the House of Quality matrix as the WHATs.

QFD: Step 2 – How’s to VOC

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • In Step 2, a list of technical features is added across the top of the matrix.
  • These are the HOWs or design elements necessary to satisfy the WHATs.
  • Through the QFD process, the technical features are vetted against one another and against the WHATs to determinehow wellthey satisfy the customer’s need

QFD: Step 3 – How’s Interaction

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • One of the primary goals of QFD is to identify tradeoff areas that require a technological breakthrough in order to satisfy both customer requirements.
  • Numerical values can be used ranging from -9(strong negative interaction)to 9 (strong positive interaction).
  • Different QFD models may use different symbols, and may not use numerical values.

QFD: Step 4 – Main Interaction

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • In Step 4, identify and evaluate the main relationships between the WHATs and HOWs. Using a numerical and color-coded key, identify the strength of the interaction between characteristics.
  • Those How’s that interact most strongly with the most high-priority What’s become the highest priority solutions to meet customer requirements.

QFD: Step 5 – Competitive Analysis

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • In Step 5, first identify the priority of each customer requirement. We have used a 1-5 scale. You may need to interview / survey customers to collect this priority information.
  • After establishing customer priorities, add competitive information from benchmarking analysis. This will help determine whether your design actions will yield a competitive advantage.

QFD: Step 6 – Deployment Priority

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • In Step 6, calculate the deployment priorities for each Technical Feature by adding the product of each interaction value (from Step 4) multiplied by the Customer Priority value.
  • Rank the scores to get an idea of which Technical Features are most important to satisfy the array of Customer Requirements

QFD: Notes

Will Six Sigma Be Relevant For The Future
  • When tradeoffs between features are present, the decision should be weighted in favor of the higher ranking feature.
  • Post 6 Steps, the current How's will become What's of next house i.e., once the Design parameters are found then process parameters are discovered as well with similar process.

Expert's Comment

  • All that you wanted to know about QFD is that it is the most important tool of DMADV project and can be used stand-alone.
  • I have used QFD in all my new initiatives, be it my E-commerce business that I had set up, current Lean6sigmapro & Skoolz.in business, the methodology has given me results. All the time.

TOP