Focusing consistently on customer desires, QFD ensures these are always considered during both the design process and various quality assurance milestones throughout the entire product lifecycle. The Level 3 QFD is used during the Process Development Phase where we examine which of the processes or process steps have any correlation to meeting the component or part specifications. In the Level 3 QFD matrix, the “Whats” are the component part technical specifications and the “Hows” are the manufacturing processes or process steps involved in producing the part.

Example entries for a partially developed QFD1 table for a cordless lawn and garden hand tool with a few row and column entries are given in Fig. I have used QFD to great effect but I often wonder if the ‘voice of the customer’ is the only voice you should be listening to. For well-defined products and market needs it works fine but for radical new products the customer may not even know that they want the product until they see it. Quality function deployment is a six sigma strategy which considers quality as the primary parameter for customer satisfaction.

Level 2 QFD

The insights from the QFD phases relevant to this particular case are considered in each of the following subheadings. The customer requirements are simply fed into the rows and the design requirements fed into the columns. The relationships are recorded in the relationship L-matrix and the interactions recorded in the Roof-matrix. Additional details on competitor and technical details are optional and can be added as desired. The software then automatically creates the ranks and importance of each factor.

In this way, the focus, discipline, and resources needed to solve the problem were generated. The voice of the customer was already loud and clear, and car companies were aware of the problem, but were consistently failing to improve their designs. The reason for this was that they were following a ‘traditional’ engineering approach.

Process quality control

Once adopted, QFD shortened design cycles significantly and reduced the total number of employees required in the design process. Shifting the focus from bottom-line cost analysis to customer satisfaction brought innovations and increased sales of domestic vehicles after the surge in popularity of Japanese imports in the 1970s. The main benefit of QFD is that it ensures the customer is considered in both the design and development process, resulting in products that are more likely to satisfy your customers. Through ranking of the interactions of the “Whats” and the “Hows”, the team can determine which controls could be most useful and develop quality targets for each. This information may also be used for creating Work Instructions, Inspection Sheets or as an input to Control Plans.

At the heart of QFD lies the House of Quality, a matrix-like tool used to correlate customer needs with technical specifications. By continuously circling back to the Voice of the Customer, QFD ensures every technical requirement takes the customer into account, using matrix diagrams such as the House of Quality to drive customer value into every stage. Quality function deployment helps you keep the voice of the customer top of mind throughout the product development lifecycle. That way, customer needs and preferences are a driving force in creating a product suite that meets their expectations. Once you find specific items customers are requesting, then you can ask the customers how important it is to them to have that item, or you can rank items in order of importance.

Although this experience was related to the use of QFD, it also holds for similar methods. For VA it is already difficult to imagine how at all this method could apply to materials, as there are no parts in the material, while the method is based on the assumption that there are. This limits the freedom of designers to ‘play with’, relationships between the physical nature and the functional nature substantially. Although it might sound like a modern testing methodology, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has a 50-year track record of putting customer needs first throughout the entire product development process.

The last row of the matrix captures the “how much” values for the functions. The function removing debris from air flow, for example, has a corresponding “how much” cell where it is noted that the screen apertures have to be 1 mm maximum. Removing moisture from hair, for example is one of the main functions of a hairdryer. The last row of the matrix captures the ‘How much’ values for the functions. The function removing moisture from hair, for example has a corresponding ‘How much’ cell where it is noted that the air flow requirement must meet or exceed a defined quantity.

QFD1, compared to use of a standard PDS pro forma table, represents a more structured approach to requirement management. The QFD1 matrix allows an individual or a team to identify customer and engineering requirements and sets the relationships between these two groups of requirements. This provides an understanding of the correlation between customer requirements and functions. The QFD1 method is especially useful when the opportunity for commercial success is significant and there is a need for rigour in mapping the project requirements. QFD1, compared to use of a standard PDS pro-forma table, represents a more structured approach to requirement management.

• It’s designed to help you identify the best way to check the quality of the processes identified in the previous phase.
• First of all, it can be a seismic change for some organizations, particularly those with an established process primarily focused on profitability and cost reduction.
• Once the matrices are completed, Six Sigma Black Belt practitioners can use the information to design their process or product according to critical target values and customer requirements.
• QFD has been successfully used by many world-class organizations in automobiles, ship building, electronics, aerospace, utilities, leisure and entertainment, financial, software, and other industries.
• This article outlines how techniques such as fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, and the Taguchi method can be combined with QFD to resolve some of its drawbacks, and proposes a synergy between QFD and the three methods and techniques reviewed.

The QFD1 matrix enables the relationship between the following two sets of elements, customer requirements (or product attributes) and engineering requirements (or product functions), to be explored. In this example, the customer requirements are broken down in a tree structure including three levels. The root concepts quality function deployment definition are safety, performance, market competitiveness, and ergonomics, see Figure 2.12. Safety, for example, is subdivided into low risk to user and fire protection, overheating protection, and protection from burning. The last column of the matrix captures the “how much” values for the customer requirements.