Quality Function Deployment - Essay Example

Introduction Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a method used to ensure that the eventual design of a product or service actually meets the needs of its customers. Often called the 'house of quality' because of its shape, QFD originated in Japan where it was developed in Mitsubishi's Kobe shipyard. It has now been successfully used in various organizations throughout the world. Also, starting out as a concept for product designing, QFD is now successfully being applied to services. Unlike some other quality tools which are used during the manufacturing process, QFD is applied during the designing process. QFD also differs in the fact that it concentrates more on adding new features and components according to customer needs and expectations rather then simply focusing on eliminating features or components not required by the customer. The QFD institute describes QFD as a comprehensive quality design method that: 1. Seeks out spoken and unspoken customer needs and uncovers 'positive' qualities that wows the customer; 2. Translates these into designs characteristics and deliverable actions; and 3. Builds and delivers a quality product or service by focusing the various business functions toward achieving customer satisfaction The following essay will start with a brief look on the evolution of QFD and its expansion to the rest of the world. This will be followed by a discussion on the framework of house of quality (HoQ) as well as the elements that forms part of the HoQ. The next sections will then cover the advantages and the benefits offered by the method which will be followed by a discussion on the drawbacks of the method. Evolution of QFD The roots of QFD can be traced back to United States in 1940s with the emergence of 'value engineering'. Due to limited reources at General Moters (GM), alternative designs were considered and it often resulted in better product and lower cost. This led the management at GM to investigate and develop effective ways to improve value and resulted in launching of the program 'value analysis' (VA) in 1947 with tremendous success. In 1954, Department of Defense's bureau of Ships embraced a similar approach in it procurement activities and named its programme 'value engeenering'. However, Jiang, Shiu and Tu mention that even though the initial concept of quality originated in the United States, early industrial applications predominantly took place at Japanese companies (30). After the World War II, Japan's industry was devastated and Japanese begun rebuilding the industry with the help of Americans. Quality was given a significant importance, leading to the establishment of statistical quality control in Japanese manufacturing industry. The quality management activities at the time were concerned with quality of the product during the manufacturing process or after. During this time, Professors Shigeru Mizuno and Yoji Akao focused on developing a quality assurance method that would integrate customer satisfaction into the product even before the product was manufactured. Based on this concept, Mizuno and Akao subsequently published their first book on the topic in 1978 (Jiang, Shiu and Tu 33). In 1966, Mr Kiyotaka Oshiumi of Bridgestone Tire in Japan was presented with a process assurance items table. This table had a fishbone diagram showing the links from the substitute quality characteristics, which were converted from true qualities (customer needs), to the process factors. A further field of 'Design Viewpoints' was later added to this table. (Akao and Mazur 21) Although the idea was presented to various companies for trails, it did not generate much public interest at the time. Akao and Mazur mention that the approach at the time was still inadequate in terms of setting the design quality (21). However, this changed with the creation of quality chart by the Kobe Shipyards of Mitsubishi Heavy Industry in 1972. Their table indicated the true quality (customer needs) in terms of function and then showed the relationship between these functions and the quality characteristics. Subsequent publication of articles by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry and Yoji Akao increased the popularity of QFD (Akao and Mazur 23). QFD was introduced to the west in 1983 with publication of an article by Yoji Akao and his subsequent regular lectures to the American audiences. Akao gave similar lectures in Europe and he mentions that Italy was the first to implement QFD in Europe with hosting of the first European QFD Symposium in 1993 (Akao and Mazur 23). QFD Framework The QFD framework helps organizations seek out both spoken and unspoken needs of the customer and translate this into design. It segments the design process into many tasks overlapping the major activities. The main purpose of the QFD is to focus on the fact that the eventual design of a product or service actually meets the needs of the customer. The method therefore tries to capture 'what' the customer needs and 'how' it might be achieved. The QFD institute describes QFD as providing a system of comprehensive development process for: Understanding customer needs What 'value' means to the customer Understanding how customers or end users become interested, choose, and are satisfied Analyzing how do we know the needs of the customer Deciding what features to include Determining what level of performance to deliver Intelligently linking the needs of the customer with design, development, engineering, manufacturing, and service functions Intelligently linking Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) with the front end Voice of Customer analysis and the entire design system Implementation of QFD therefore begains with understanding of the customer needs. The first step for QFD implementation is to decide on a target market and formulate a product portfolio strategy. This is followed by a survey of the target customers and a demanded-quality deployment chart is made. The customer description and how they perceive the product must be then converted to quality characteristics. This is essential so that the R&D of the organization can determine how to technically achieve the demanded qualities. Sharma and Rawani describe that in the QFD approach, the matrix to be built is the product planning matrix (54). Also known as the 'house of quality' (HoQ) because of its house like appearance (see figure 1), the purpose of the matrix is to translate important customer requirements regarding product quality into key end-product control characteristics. The HoQ is made up of several different sections or rooms, which are gradually filled to convert customer requirements into quality characteristics. HoQ, as described by Sharma and Rawani, is discussed below. Fig 1: Basic building blocks of QFD (Source: Sharma and Rawani, 2007) Voice of Customer - Voice of Customer (VC) can be any process used to capture customer's requirements. These requirements might be unspoken and invisible to both the customer and the producer. This can be done in various ways such as direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data, field reports, complaint logs, etc. CR Triangle - The Customer Requirements (CR) correlation triangle is used to determine the interrelationships between the CRs of the matrix. Sharma and Rawani mention that trade offs between different customer requirements are identified and denoted as strong positive, positive, negative, and strong negative (54). Strategic Planning Room - Once the customer requirements and their priorities are established, the next step is to understand where the company stands in terms of satisfying these requirements in the marketplace. This is done by filling the Strategic Planning Room. The Strategic Planning Room provides a link between the QFD project and the company's strategic vision by identifying market opportunities in terms of customer needs. Voice of the Engineer and Roof - Having gone through the previous steps, the QFD team should now have a clear picture of what the customer requires from the product and how this can be related to the company's strategy. In the Voice of the Engineer room, the team decides how these requirements can be incorporated into the final product, so that the customer needs are satisfied. The triangular 'roof' is used to denote any information that the team has about the correlations between the various design characteristics. Relationship Room - The Relationship Room depicts the interrelationships between each of the customer requirement (Voice of the Customer), their significance (CR) and the Voice of the Engineer. This is a highly complex task and crucial to the HoQ. In this stage, the team is focused on how much each product characteristic affects each customer requirement and also if the company is adequately addressing the customer requirements. Technical Priorities Room - This is the final task in building the HoQ. This requires an assessment of the end-product's characteristics of products currently in the market. This helps the QFD team to view the competitor's as well as their own technical performance regarding product characteristics and how it affects customer requirements. This section contains the absolute importance of each design characteristic. Evaluation of HoQ matrix - Based on the results of the analysis, the QFD team selects the end-product characteristics to be deployed through the remainder of the product development. Although the details of QFD analysis may vary in different sections, the aim is to identify customer requirements for a product or service and to relate them to the product design. At this point it is worth mentioning that QFD is not just house of quality and this has been frequently pointed out by Akao (QFD Institute). Although HoQ is commonly associated with QFD it need not necessarily be in case of modern QFD. HoQ is an assembly of several deployment hierarchies and tables that connects the relation between the voice of the customer and the voice of the engineer. Thus, in cases where only a few critical customer needs are deployed, the House of Quality may be completely unnecessary. Unlike traditional QFD which relied heavily on HoQ, modern QFD is more custom-tailored to identify the minimum QFD effort required with the optimum tools and sequence, making QFD more efficient and sustainable. Being based on Blitz QFD modern QFD replaces complex tools such as the HoQ in favor of smaller and faster ones. Benefits of QFD Various studies have shown the many benefits achieved by the application of QFD in the design process. As QFD starts with a focus on better understanding of customer needs, the products the obviously better customer oriented. However, the application of QFD has shown to have other benefits such as increased production efficiency, reduction of implementation time and better promotion of teamwork. Herrmann et al. point to the Japanese view QFD as a philosophy that ensures high product quality in the design stage (347). The authors compiled and discussed a list of benefits because of QFD from various literatures on the subject. Some of the benefits of QFD are discussed below: The primary benefits of QFD are reduced design costs and development time QFD lead to improved communication and cohesion within a product development or improvement team and solidifying design decisions early in the development cycle. QFD results in efficiency for the companies because misinterpretation and need for changes are minimized. QFD has the strategic benefit of better understanding the customer needs, increased quality of advertising and communication, and faster decision making resulting in increase in customer satisfaction. QFD has results in a marked improvement in product quality. Many problems and difficulties in the quality of goods and services have been resolved on a long-term basis due to application of QFD. QFD has results in reduced expenditure due reduction in reworking as well as reduction in cost for research and development. QFD is also considered time saving and reduces the time to market through systematic implementation and better coordination of projects. The authors further point to the studies which state that if QFD is properly used, results in 30-50 percent less engineering changes, 30-50 percent shorter design cycles, 20-60 percent lower start up costs, and 20-50 percent fewer warranty are expected (Herrmann et al., 347). One prominent example mentioned by the authors is that of Toyota. Toyota introduced four new vans in late 1970s and early 1980s. The company reported a reduction of 20 percent in their start-up costs for a new van launched in 1979. By 1984, the cumulative cost reduction covering all four vehicles went up to 61 percent (Herrmann et al., 347). Drawbacks of QFD Although QFD has been successfully applied by many organizations, many of the companies have also reported drawbacks associated with the method. This include the access realiability on the VOC, complexity of HoQ, impresicion in setting target values in the HoQ method among others. Devadasan, Kathiravan and Thirunavukkarasu discussed the drawbacks of QFD found in the various literature on the subject (145-146). Some of these drawbacks are summarized below: QFD analysis is dominated by a group of personnel possessing theoretical expertise and prevents the complete involvement of less knowledge personnel who might possess practical knowledge relevant to the product manufacturing. The analysis takes considerably longer to complete as the HoQ cannot be decomposed into tables. The special symbols used to construct the HoQ and representing different correlations, might pose difficulty in interpretation for anyone not exposed to the not exposed to the QFD process. QFD is focused on design improvements and therefore predominantly used for evolving new product. Therefore application of QFD might not benefit other functions such as the production process, procurement, research and development, service etc. There are other drawbacks associated with QFD such as its reliability of customer input. An inadequate customer survey might hamper the efficiency of QFD analysis. Also customer needs change frequently and an outdated survey might not give the full benefit. Further, being a concept that has primarily evolved in Japan, the application may have difficulty being applied in other countries because of the cultural differences and method of working. Again, as mentioned previously, it is worth noting that many innovations in the application has reduced or completely removed some of the drawbacks offered by the traditional QFD. For example, modern QFD has more refined voice of customer which can better define spoken and unspoken customer needs. Also, new innovations such as Blitz QFD have made QFD easier and efficient. Conclusion QFD has found great success in the manufacturing organization and is now being applied successfully to services. There is no doubt about the benifts that QFD can bring to the orgnization if properly applied. Unlike some other quality tools, QFD offers the primary benefit of integrating the customer requiremnts in the designing prosess rather then during the manufacturing which reduces reworking. It further increases organizational efficiency and ensures more successful products. The limited number of current experts does seem to be a constraint as of now but this only show the future potential of the tool. Also with improved innovation in other research tools such as those used to obatin the VOC, significant impact can be achieved on the popularity of QFD. The benefits of QFD application as shown by various studies, will only increase the popularity and bring more innovation to the method. Works Cited Akao, Yoji and Mazur, Glenn H. "The leading edge in QFD: Past, present and future." The International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management 20.1 (2003): 20-36 Devadasan, S.R., Kathiravan, N. and Thirunavukkarasu, V. "Theory and practice of total quality function deployment: A perspective from a traditional pump-manufacturing environment" The TQM Magazine 18.2 (2006): 143-162 Herrmann, Andreas. et al. "An empirical study of quality function deployment on company performance" The International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management 23.4 (2006): 345-366 Jiang, Jui-Chin, Shiu, Ming-Li and Tu, Mao-Hsiung. "QFD's Evolution in Japan and the West." Quality Progress 40.7 (2007): 30-38 QFD Institute. 28 March 2008 Sharma, J.R. and Rawani, A.M. "Ranking Customer Requirements in QFD by Factoring in Their Interrelationship Values" The Quality Management Journal 14.4 (2007): 53-61 Read More