Quality Function Development - Research Paper Example

Strategy in Action Abstract The objective of Quality Function Development (QFD) is to improve the product development cycle as well as improving quality of product and developing the product at lower cost. QFD is a systematic and structured planning tool which is used to convert the voice of the customer into appropriate technical requirements. Now the production of the product or service is carried out according to it (i.e.) it helps in fulfilling the customer expectation by incorporating their expectations in the product design engineering and production process. QFD is a team based management tool which incorporates the customer expectations in the product development process. The advantage of the above is that we can quite often find the expectation of one customer is just opposite of the expectation of another customer which means their expectations are conflicting. Now it becomes necessary for the company to resolve these conflicts at the initial stage itself and incorporate only those that are expected by the customer in the product development process. Market research becomes an important prerequisite for incorporating the customer’s views. In this paper, we would be discussing the application of Quality Function Development model to a product, the utility of the model and the problems encountered in its application. Literature Review An organization that properly implements Quality Function Development can improve their engineering knowledge in producing a particular product; this can in turn improve productivity and quality of the product and can also cut down the production time and cost (Brocka & Brocka, 1992, pp.27-28). This is achieved by companies by incorporating the voice of the customers into, 1. The product planning process 2. Parts development process 3. Process planning process 4. Production planning process, and 5. While providing service to customers The problem that a company is likely to face during this process is that a) Some customer’s expectations are just opposite of the expectations of other customers b) Customer fined it difficult in communicating their exact expectations in a product (Cooper & Noonan, 2003, pp.25-31; Crago, 2002, pp.41-43). These two factors would lead to confusion and misinterpretation of data when a product moves from the market research stage to design stage and then to engineering stage and at last to manufacturing stage. One can quite often find that once the customer expectations are passing from the market research stage to manufacturing stage (Bunch, 2003, pp.31-36) a lot of their expectations would be lost in each stages and the voice of the organization enters into the product design stage. As a result the company goes in for incorporating in the product what the customers had not asked in for rather than incorporating in the product what the customers had asked in for (Cochran, 2003, pp.43-47). But if the company goes in for incorporating QFD system then the companies can always go in for incorporating the customer’s expectations in the product. QFD helps in removing the design error so that company need not spend money and time in redesigning the product. QFD is a set of graphically oriented planning matrices that helps in identifying factors based on which decisions can be made during any phase of the product development cycle (Gordon, 2003, pp.37-40). QFD is nothing but a perfect blue print for quality by design. The results of incorporating QFD in an organization can be measured by looking into the number of designs and engineering changes brought in during the product development and manufacturing stage. It can also be evaluated based on the cost incurred quality of product and time taken to market the product after incorporating QFD (Franco, 2001, pp.28-32) and what had been the value of these factors before QFD was implemented. Once QFD is implemented then the amount of time and money spent by an organization on redesigning and modifications drastically comes down. Once this is achieved it means that the company can launch their product in the market much earlier than they could by following the traditional method. House of quality The first and foremost planning tool used in QFD is the house of quality. The house of quality helps in converting the voice of the customers into the product design that meets specific target values and matches them against how an organization will meet these requirements. The walls of the house are the customer requirements. The left side wall shows what the customers expects in a product or to put it in simple words it is the voice of the customer. The right wall of the house is the prioritized customer requirements. It is other wise called as the planning matrix. Some of the items that are can find on this side are, customer benchmarking, customer rating, target value etc. The second floor of the house consists of the technical descriptors. These are nothing but the engineering characteristics that have to be used by the company to meet the customer requirements (Westcott, 2003, pp.49-52). Inside the house we have the relationship between what the customer requires and that of the technical descriptors (i.e.) to put it in simple worlds the customer’s expectations are converted into engineering characteristics. The roof of the house gives the interrelationship between various technical descriptors. So that the company can trade off between the technical descriptors to meet the customer requirement. The foundation of the house has the prioritized technical descriptors. (i.e.) It includes technical benchmarking target value etc. This is the basic structure and the components of house of quality. Steps involved in Building house of quality Listing Customer Requirements The first step is to list the customer requirements (what’s). QFD process starts with listing down the goals or objectives that the company has to achieve. This list is prepared by finding out what the customers expect from a product. The list that we collect from the customer may be unclear, vague and general. These vague general expectations are modified into new more detailed list of secondary requirements of the customers (Shipley, 2003, pp.26-28). This is done in such a way that if the secondary requirements are satisfied by the company it means that their primary expectation will also be satisfied. To put it in simple words the vague, general expectations of the employees are converted into simple understandable expectations. Lot of secondary requirements of the customers combines to form the primary requirements of the customers. This process of splitting the primary requirement into many small secondary requirements is carried out so that the production people can take necessary actions to achieve these requirements. If the secondary requirement has to be further broken up into small territory requirements, so that it can be taken by the production department the splitting process is carried out. To conclude we can say, in this step the customer requirements are broken up into smaller requirements for which actions can be carried out. Listing technical descriptor (How’s) The next step involved in building house of quality is to identify the technical descriptors that will affect one or more customer requirements that have been identified in the first step. The descriptors are selected in such a way that they affect a customer requirement and can be expressed in measurable terms. It is impossible to incorporate the customer’s requirements into the product unless they are converted into counterpart characteristics. Counterpart characteristics are nothing but the customers requirements expressed in technical language (Spigener & Angelo, 2003, pp.61-64). In this step for each and every customer requirement that is broken into smaller requirements the technical descriptor that would, be needed to achieve it is found out. This process is something similar to refining the data collected in market research into system level engineering, specifications. Now once the primary technical descriptors are identified these primary technical descriptors are subdivided into secondary descriptors so that the organization will have a better idea of how to achieve the customer requirements. This is nothing but refining the system level specification into part level specification. If the organization feels that the secondary level, technical descriptor has to be further subdivided. It can be divided so that we have clear cut part level specification and engineering parameters. So that the engineers can understand it and they can incorporate these into the production process. Relationship matrix The next step involved is to determine the relationship between the various customer requirements and technical descriptors. Determining the relationship between the technical descriptor and the customer requirement is a very tedious process because one customer requirement may affect more than one technical descriptor and vice versa (London, 2002, pp.26-33). The method that can be followed to simplify this process is to use an L shaped matrix. Now with this L shaped matrix we can easily determine the relationship between the technical descriptor and the customer requirement. Now the QFD team can go in for filling the inside of the house. The result that we get is called as the relationship matrix. The relationship matrix is prepared by graphically representing the degree of relationship or influence between each customer requirement and technical descriptor. This is a time consuming process but once we carry out this process properly during the early stages of the development process there will be no future modifications in the product and this helps to reduce the development cycle to a large extent. Symbols are used to represent degree of relationship between the customer requirements and the technical descriptors. - Represents a strong relationship - Represents a medium relationship - Represents a week relationship The box is left blank if no relationship exists. According to the type of relationship between the customer requirement and technical descriptor, that particular symbol is placed at the intersecting point the symbol that we are using can be quantified so that it simplifies the decision making process. The following weights can be assigned to the symbols. - 9 - 3 -1 Once the relationship matrix is completed, now we will have to check for empty rows and columns. An empty row would indicate that particular customer requirement has not been addressed by any of the technical descriptor which means that the particular customer requirement has not been met. So now it becomes necessary to identify some other new technical descriptor so that the particular customer requirement can be catered. Similarly an empty column indicates that the given technical descriptor does not affect any of the customer requirements, so it is an unnecessary technical descriptor. So the particular technical descriptor can be removed from the house of quality. Interrelationship matrix between How’s The roof of the house of quality is named as the correlation matrix: The correlation matrix is helpful in finding out the relationship between the technical descriptors. As we have used in the relationship matrix here also we use symbol to describe the degree of relationship. - A strong positive relationship - A positive relationship - A negative. Relationship - A strong negative relationship These symbols can be quantified and the following weights are assigned in these symbols. - +9 - +3 - 3 - 9 The correlation matrix helps to identify the technical descriptors that support each other and those that conflict each other. The conflicting technical descriptors are very much important in the sense; they are the outcome of conflicting customer requirements. This means these are the points where the company will have to trade off, so that all customers’ requirements are taken care of. Those trade offs that are not identified and solved will lead to unfulfilled customer requirements that will lead to further engineering changes, increase in cost and poor quality, resulting in, customer’ dissatisfaction. Competitive assessments (Pyzdek, 1989, pp.43-61) In the competitive assessment stage we go in for comparing our product with that of competitor’s product on each of the factors. The competitive assessment can be broadly classified into two types. a) Customer assessment b) Technical assessment Prioritize the customer requirements In this we go in for ranking each and every customer requirement according to its importance. So that the company will have an idea about which are the factors that are be incorporated first in the product and the factors to which due importance has to be given. To find the importance of each and every customer requirement we go in for finding the weightage for each and every customer requirement the customer requirement with the highest weightage will be that feature that the company has to give the highest priority. The following formula is used to calculate the weightage for each customer requirements (Rienzo, 1993, pp.19-29). Absolute weight = (importance to customer) x (scale up factor) x (sales point). QFD process The first house of quality built becomes the basis for building further house of quality. The reason for building more house of quality is that very often we find that we cannot get solution for the given problem with a single house of quality. The reason why we cannot get solution is that, the technical descriptors that have been identified under the first house of quality is not to the level where actions can be taken but these technical descriptors need refinement so that they come to the level where actions can be taken. The way to proceed to the next house of quality is as follows. The new house of quality is created by converting the entire “How’s” of the previous charts to “what’s” of the new charts (Travalini, 2001, pp.105-108). To put it in simple words “How’s” of the previous chart becomes “what’s” of the next chart. This process of creating new house of quality continues till all the technical descriptors are refined to the achievable level. The prioritized technical descriptors values are carried to the next house of quality. This is done to ensure that the values are not lost during the QFD process. This is because once the target value changes, then the product will not meet the customer requirement which means that the very purpose of QFD is not met because customer’s voice is not taken care of. The general steps involved in QFD can be explained as follows. The first step is the product planning step. Here the company goes in for planning the features of the product based on the customer requirements. Once the set of design requirement are identified from the customer requirements now we can move on to the next step which is developing the parts of the product based on the design requirements that have been identified. So after this step is completed the company would have identified the quality characteristics of each and every parts of the product. The next step is the process planning stage were the company goes in for identifying the steps that are to be carried and the ways to carry out the steps so that each and every parts of the product can be manufactured as per the customer requirement. The last step involved in the process is to identify the production requirements to carry out the necessary operations for producing the necessary components of the product. The above explained steps can be pictorially represented as follows. We can find here that the output of stage one becomes the input of stage two, so on and so forth. Application of the QFD Model A.M Corporation sells sports drinks to the general public. They have always been very much tuned with the health and nutritional needs of their customers. Recently their focus has turned to another aspect of their business: the containers their drinks are provided in. They have decided to utilize a Quality Function Development Model when redesigning their sports drink bottles. The Voice of the Customer The first step in creating the QFD involves a survey of their customer expec­tations (Hutton, 2000, pp.125-127), needs, and requirements associated with their sports drink bottles. A.M Corporation met with several focus groups of their customers to capture their infor­mation. Following these meetings, they organized and recorded the wants of the customers in the column located on the left side of the matrix (Refer Appendix 1). Customer’s ranking on the relative importance of his or her wants After A.M Corporation organized the data, they reconvened the focus groups. At that time, they gave each of the participants an imaginary $100 to spend on the recorded wants. The participants were instructed to allocate more dol­lars to their more important wants. They recorded their values on the matrix next to the list of recorded wants. Following the meetings, A.M Corporation created the final matrix by combining the values assigned by all the customers. The wants with higher dollar values are those the customers consider more de­sirable (Refer Appendix 2). Customer’s evaluation of the company against competitors (Juran, 2003, pp.48-56) At the same meeting, the customers also evaluated A.M Corporation’s competi­tors. In this step the participants divided $100 between A.M Corporation and its competitors. The customers awarded more money to the company that they felt provided the best product or service for their recorded want. Following the meetings, A.M Corporation created the final matrix by combining the values as­signed by all the customers. Higher values represented where A.M Corporation needed to focus their efforts (Refer Appendix 3). Fulfilling the wants of Customer At this point A.M Corporation’s efforts focused on determining how they were going to meet the wants identified by the customers. They spent many hours in meetings discussing the technical requirements necessary for satisfying the customers’ recorded wants. These requirements were recorded at the tops of the columns in the matrix. A.M Corporation made sure that the technical require­ments, or “how’s,” were phrased in terms that were measurable and could be translated into organizational actions. Several of the wants needed two or more technical requirements to make them happen (Refer Appendix 4). The direction of improvement for the technical requirements During the meetings discussing technical requirements, those involved also discussed the appropriate specifications for the technical requirements. They were able to identify how those technical requirements could be improved. For instance, for the comment “Fluid lost horizontal/vertical,” the appropriate direction of improvement for this is “less,” denoted by a down­ward arrow (Refer Appendix 5). Operational goals for the technical requirements A.M Corporation identified the operational goals that will enable them to meet the technical requirements (Refer Appendix 6). Relationship between each of the customer wants and the tech­nical requirements How does action on (a change in) a technical requirement affect customer satisfaction with the recorded want? The team members at A.M Corporation studied the relationship between the cus­tomer wants and the technical requirements (Refer Appendix 7). They used the fol­lowing notations: 1. A strong positive correlation is denoted by the value 9 or a filled-in circle. 2. A positive correlation is denoted by the value 3 or an open circle. 3. A weak correlation is denoted by the value 1 or a triangle. 4. If no correlation exists, then the box remains empty. 5. If there is a negative correlation, the box is marked with a minus sign. Correlation between the technical requirements The team members recorded the correlation between the different technical requirements in the “roof” of the QFD “house” (Refer Appendix 8). This triangular table shows the relationship between each of the technical requirements. Once again, they used the same notations: 1. A strong positive correlation is denoted by the value 9 or a filled-in circle. 2. A positive correlation is denoted by the value 3 or an open circle. 3. A weak correlation is denoted by the value 1 or a triangle. 4. If no correlation exists, then the box remains empty. 5. If there is a negative correlation, the box is marked with a minus sign. Comparative study of the technical performance with that of competitors At this point A.M Corporation compared their abilities to generate the technical requirements with the abilities of their competitors. On the matrix this infor­mation is shown in the technical competitive assessment (Refer Appendix 9). The technical importance At this point the matrix is nearly finished. In order to analyze the information presented, the correlation values for the wants and the how’s are multiplied by the values from the rankings of the $100 test. For example, for the first column a ranking of 2 for “doesn’t leak” is multiplied by a value of 9 (for “strong correlation”), for a total of 18. To this value the ranking of 6 (for “sealed when purchased”) is multiplied by a value of 1 (for “weak correla­tion”). The grand total for the column is 24 (Refer Appendix 10). Regulatory and internal requirements Here, any rules, regulations, or requirements set forth not by the customer but by some other agency or by government were identified and recorded (Refer Appendix 10). Analysis of the QFD matrix and problems encountered What did the customer want? How is this supported by customer ran kings and competitive comparisons? How well is the competition doing? How does our company compare? Where will our company’s emphasis need to be? (Harrington, 2002, p.14) A.M Corporation studied the matrix they created and came to the following conclu­sions. In order to satisfy their customers and maintain a competitive advantage, they will have to focus their efforts on designing a sports drink bottle that: 1. Fits into a standard cup holder in a vehicle (that is, the base must not ex­ceed 3 inches). 2. Does not leak at any time in any position. The technical requirements asso­ciated with this requirement are that (a) the lid diameter must be no larger than 3/4 Inch; (b) there must be 4 threads per cap; and (c) the cap must be reapplied at 1 in.-lb. of force maximum. 3. Is easy to open and close, requiring no more than 2 in.-lb. of force to open and 1 in.-lb. of force to close. 4. Does not slip out of the drinker’s hand easily. For this reason the bottle di­ameter should be no smaller than 3 inches, and the type of plastic utilized must have the appropriate coefficient of friction. Conclusion Asking customers what they want, need, and require is a time-consuming process. As was seen in the quality function deployment model (Refer Appendix 2), translating customers’ wants into an organization’s how’s paramount to the success of any organization seeking to align its products and services with the processes that provide them with what the customer wants. Organizations that ignore the relationship be­tween what a customer wants and how the organization is going to provide that want can never be effective. Leadership and strategic planning are crucial links in this alignment process. Leaders point to the customer wants on which the organization is going to fo­cus. Strategic plans link the goals and objectives of projects and day-to-day activities in the organization with the customer wants. Because quality is such an essential dimension for a product or service, it is critical that an organization take the customer information they have gathered, translate it into organizational actions, and disseminate this information throughout the organization. Strategic plans, guided by good leadership, allow this to happen. References Brocka, B & Brocka, M. 1992. Quality Management: Implementing the Best Ideas of the Masters, Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, pp.27-28. Bunch, R. 2003. “AQP Awards Promote Business Results,” Quality Progress, pp.31-36. Cochran, C. 2003. “Breaking Down the Walls,” Quality Digest, pp.43-47. Cooper, N & Noonan, P. 2003. “Do Teams and Six Sigma Go Together,” Quality Progress, pp.25-31. Crago, M. 2002. “Meeting Patient Expectations,” Quality Progress, pp.41-43. Franco, V. R. 2001. “Adopting Six Sigmas,” Quality Digest, June, pp.28-32. Gordon, D. 2003. “AS9000: One Approval Accepted Everywhere,” Quality Digest, pp.37-40. Harrington, J. 2002. “Creating New Middle Managers,” Quality Digest, p.14. Hutton, D. W. 2000. From Baldrige to the Bottom Line, Milwaukee: ASQ Quality Press, pp.125-127. Juran, J M. 2003. Juran on Leadership for Quality: an Executive Handbook, New York: Free Press, pp.48-56. London, C. 2002. “Strategic Planning for Business Excellence,” Quality Progress, pp.33-36. Pyzdek, T. 1989. “What Every Engineer Should Know About Quality Control,” New York, Marcel Dekker, pp. 43-61. Rienzo, T F. 1993. “Planning Deming Management for Service Organizations,” Business Horizons, pp.19-29. Shipley, D. 2003. “ISO 9000 Makes Integrated Systems User Friendly,” Quality Progress, pp.26-28. Spigener, J B & Angelo, P A. 2001. “What Would Deming Say?” Quality Progress, pp.61-64. Travalini, M. 2001. “The Evolution of a Quality Culture,” Quality Progress, pp.105-108. Westcott, R. 2003. “Overlooked and Underutilized: ISO 9004,” Quality Digest, pp.49-52. Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Appendix 5 Appendix 6 Appendix 7 Appendix 8 Appendix 9 Appendix 10 Read More