Quality Function Deployment of a House of Quality Diagram - Essay Example

?Assessing quality function deployment of a product requires taking consecutive steps in analysis starting with the and interacting with thetechnical side of Research and development department. Each market segment needs separate quality function deployment and matching “House of Quality” matrix. (Gaucher, E., Coffey R., 1993.) We would mess up if we collected important customer views about needed product features from Mercedes customers if we are selling Lada or Trabant and vice versa. We start building the house of quality from the left side although our customer is always right. The first brick or building block should give us some information about what our target audience wants. Analyzing performance of our hand held battery operated drill among the target audience of small business operators they gave us answers in deep expecting “Voice of the Customer” that main features they require from a hand held drill are time of operation before it needs recharging, its weight as they have to carry it and hammering speed if they need to drill into concrete. (Akao, Yoji., 1990) They were not concerned about other features like durability, parts and service availability, warranty, price or maintenance so we did not have to group customer wishes into smaller groups in a way of affinity or a tree diagram. In our next step we encounter Planning Matrix at the right side of QFD house modeled matrix. Its function is many-fold as it quantifies the “Voice of the Customer” and allows for its adjustments with the issues concerning the design team. (Gibson, J., 1995) First we need to get our customers rate how important is for them chosen requirement that we found asking them on the left side of the house. (Gaucher, E., Coffey R., 1993) We can gather this information by questionnaires where customers can rate how important the feature is for them on a scale from 1-5 or 1-10 or we can use analytical hierarchy process by combining two features and asking them which one means more to them. The second method requires a little more work on our side. At the same time when we already have a customer willing to cooperate we should also ask if she/he can evaluate his satisfaction with our product and some competitors products as a whole and by separate features. Once done and statistically measured this number are basis for comparison and calculations of Planned Satisfaction Rating, Improvement Factor, Sales Point, and Overall Weighting. Our customers gave us Feature Importance rating of 4.5 for ability to work longer without recharging 2.7 for having hammering ability and 1.8 to be light to carry around. They marked our product with 3.6 for battery life, 1.8 for easy carrying and 3.1 for hammering ability. Competitor A and B got the following marks respectively: battery life 3.2 and 2.9, easy to carry 2.9 and 3.7, and for hammering ability 1 and 4.4. (Akao, Y., 1990) Our guys from technical department added a column for Planned Satisfaction Rating at 4 for battery life, 2 for easy carry and unchanged for hammering ability. Thus improvement factor for battery life came at 1.4, for easy to carry feature at 1.2 and unchanged 1 for hammering ability. We thought that battery life could be our next sales point so we added additional 1.5 weights to it from sales perspective. (Cooper, R., 1993) The third building block oh the “House of Quality” matrix consists of technical requirements recognized as the Voice of the Company. (Gibson, J., 1995, p.8) QFD team here identifies all measurable characteristics of the product as they relate to customer wish list. A line can be added here that shows whether we need to increase or decrease the feature as decrease to make it lighter or increase to make it last longer. In our case we noted battery life increase requirement and weight decrease requirement while we think that we are on the money with one hammering speed. In the middle section of the “House of Quality” matrix we assign different weights to relationships. This is rather subjective and may lead to wrong results and thus wrong message to R&D and production if done in haste. (Webb, J., Hayes. 1990) Very careful analysis is needed in this portion to make the “House of Quality” matrix relevant. Besides being correct in assigning weights it is very important also what kind of weights do we assign for the highest importance, medium importance and low importance. No importance always gets zero. We assigned 9 points to highest importance, 3 points to medium importance and 1 point to low importance. (Akao, Y., 1983) Did we do it right? Only time can tell for sure. There is a lot of speculation here as we are not improving the market position of our product against a stone but against innovative and smart competition. These weight numbers should account for their expected moves, too. So, for the drill to work longer battery life is of highest importance, while it is of medium importance for easy to carry and low importance for hammering. Weight is of medium importance for lasting longer and of high importance for easy to carry while we think it is of no importance for hammering ability. Speed is of low importance for lasting longer, no importance for easy to carry and high importance for hammering ability. (Cooper, Robert G. 1993) The roof is a triangular matrix that explains how technical features impact each other. It shows whether a pair of features is in conflict or cooperation. If one helps the other we mark it with a plus and with a minus if improving one negatively impacts the other. If there is no relation an empty space or zero fills the space. We could also use colors to show whether interaction is weak, medium or strong and when analyzing many features this would be definitively useful. We can see that battery life and weight are inversely correlated while speed does not have any impact either weight or battery life. (Ehrlich, D., 1994, p.7) We did all the previous matrices for the results we expect from the foundation of the “House of Quality” matrix. In the foundations we set technical priorities which are functions of right and central matrices. Importance for the customer of each requirement is weighted by incremental planned improvement and with sales point and then multiplied by the importance assigned to relationships. This part can also be used to show benchmarking against competition and its main importance is to set target features for the next generation of a product. Checking all parts of the house QFD team sets targets for the new features. Based on the checkout of all the rooms in the “House of Quality“matrix and recent developments of lighter batteries we see that our new product should have longer battery life and be at the same time lighter. The “House of Quality” could be replicated into a neighborhood as product targets are transformed into parts targets into process targets and process targets into target production settings. References: Akao, Yoji, ed. 1990. Quality function Deployment: Integration Customer Requirements into Product Design. Translated by Glenn Mazur. Cambridge, MA: Prductivity Press. ISBN 0-95299-41-0 Akao, Yoji, 1983. Comanty-Wide QC and Quality Deployment. Chicago, IL: The Cambridge Corporation. Cooper, Robert G. 1993. Writing at Net Products, 2nd Edition. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-20-56381-9 Ehrlich, Debora. 1994. “Health Care: Tailoring a Service Industry.” Transactions from the Fourth Symposium on Quality Function Deployment. Ann Arbor, MI:QFD Institute. ISBN 1-889477-04-4 Gaucher, Ellen and Richard Coffey. 1993. Total Quality in Health Care: From Theory to Practice. The Jossey-Bass Health Series. ISBN: 555425348. Gibson, Jeff. 1995. “Happy Feel Part II: Return of the Princeton Foot Clinic.” Transactions from the Seventh Symposium on Quality Function Deployment. Ann Arbor, MI: QFD Institute. Webb, Joseph L. and W. C. Hayes. 1990. “Quality function Deployment at FPL.” Transactions from the Second Symposium on Quality Deployment, Ann Arbor, MI: QFD Institute. IBSN 1-889477-02-8. Read More