5.2 Quality Function Deployment

Quality function deployment is also known as House of Quality. The name house of quality comes from the fact that the analysis chart matrix is in the shape of a house. Yoji Akao is widely regarded as the father of QFD and his work led to its first implementation at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's Kobe Shipyard in 1972. Yoji Akao considered QFD as a method for developing a quality design aimed at satisfying the customer and then translating the consumer's demands into design targets and also to implement the major quality assurance points to be used throughout the production phase. The main focus of QFD is meeting customer needs through the use of their actual statements (known as voice of customer, VOC). The QFD translates the customer requirements, the market research and technical benchmarking data into an appropriate number of prioritised engineering targets to be met by a new product design.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) translates decision criteria or Critical-To-Quality (CTQ) parameters into a prioritized set of targets, choices, or improvement opportunities - helping to produce better products, processes, services, or strategies.

The exterior walls of the house are the customer requirements (Figure 5.1). On the left side is a list of the voice of the customer, which are the customer requirements. Immediately after customer requirements are the prioritized customer requirements, or planning matrix (this can be placed just before customer competitive assessment as shown in Figure 5.2). On the right side of the QFD matrix...