To help with the creation of creative design concepts, employ methods like mind mapping, morphological analysis, or TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). These methods encourage the development of concepts, the investigation of potential options, and the discovery of original strategies. With the design targets established, it’s time to generate various design concepts or ideas that have the potential to meet the targets. Encourage the design team to engage in creative thinking and brainstorming, and think about including stakeholders with diverse areas of expertise. For instance, technical descriptors could include weight, material strength, battery life, or impact resistance if a customer demands a compact and reliable smartphone. The quantifiable characteristics that must be taken into account during the design phase are defined by these descriptors.
By following a few tips and using quality management software, businesses can successfully implement quality function deployment and produce quality products or services. With a quality control plan, businesses can identify potential quality issues early in development and take steps to avoid or resolve them. This, in turn, helps businesses save time and money by preventing quality issues from escalating. A QFD2 matrix explores the relationship between engineering requirements (or product functions) and product parts. The functions are inherited from the QFD1 matrix, so the first column in Figure 2.13 matches the top row in Figure 2.12. The process to complete this matrix is similar to that illustrated for QFD1.
What Is Quality Function Deployment and How Can It Benefit Your Business?
The House of Quality (HOQ) is a visual matrix that methodically records and arranges the connections between technical descriptors and customer requirements. The HOQ is a tool for prioritizing design work, efficiently allocating resources, and ensuring that design choices are in line with customer expectations. Indicating the technical priorities based on the relationships between customer requirements and engineering characteristics. Also providing quantitative design targets for each of the engineering characteristics, based on the technical priorities and competitive benchmarking. QFD is a tool to help structure product planning and design and aims to ensure that customer needs are focused on throughout a project from concept design through to manufacture. At the heart of QFD is the House of Quality which links predetermined customer attributes to specific technical characteristics.
In this room, the CRs are quantified and ranked in order of their importance. Following this procedure, the requirements demanding more improvement are considered as prime selling points by Marketing, thus obtain higher weighting. These customers’ requirements might be beneficial (higher values are desired) or nonbeneficial (lower values are preferred). The beneficial or nonbeneficial nature of the CRs is dictated by the value of the corresponding improvement driver (+1 for beneficial attribute and −1 for nonbeneficial attribute).
Learn More About Quality Function Deployment (QFD)
This helps identify additional opportunities or conflicts in areas such as design, product development, engineering, etc. In this guide, we’ll explore the key components of QFD, including the house of quality and the VOC. We’ll also delve into the four phases of the QFD process and provide a practical example of how it can be applied in product development.
An example of this was the use of QFD to design a new material for car bumpers and dashboards. A chemical company in the Netherlands made an effort to implement QFD for this purpose and soon found out how materials ‘behaved’, differently from artifacts in the QFD matrix. The columns in the matrix in that case are not artifact properties but material properties. For artifacts it is not difficult to change one feature without affecting the others.
The House of Quality is your first phase and is the foundation of the other QFD phases. Without a clear definition of the customer’s needs, the final outcome function deployment is likely to fall short of satisfying your customer. A large financial institution wanted to create a new model for a brick and mortar banking center.
For example, it would be preferable for the weight of a smartphone to be lower, so the example includes a down arrow. On the other hand, it would be preferable for the battery to be higher (last longer), so the House of Quality example includes an up arrow. After you calculate all the importance ratings, you can take each rating divided by the total for your percentages. The requirements with the highest importance ratings or percentages are likely the features that your company should prioritize or invest in more. Next to the customer needs you have listed, rate how important each requirement is on a scale of 1 to 5.
The purpose of the product planning matrix is to translate customer requirements into important design features. Individual customer needs are ranked for importance, and the cumulative effect on each of the design features is obtained. A product deployment matrix is made for each of the product features, all the way down to the subsystem and component level. The product deployment matrix depicts the extent to which the relationship between component and product characteristics is critical and affordable.
- The quality function deployment is the task of design engineers; however, the efforts of all the departments are required to implement it successfully.
- The insights from the QFD phases relevant to this particular case are considered in each of the following subheadings.
- Therefore, we employed a Wesserman method for normalization of the relationship matrix, which considers the coefficients of both the relationship matrix and the co-relationship matrix.
- It’s time to put the detailed design into practice and test it under actual working conditions.
- Not doing so can compromise the organization’s development of the product.
Therefore, communication throughout the business is enhanced as conforming to the organization’s strategic objectives is made easier. Building a team is crucial for delivery and daily operations in any organization, but it’s imperative in product management. The house of quality matrix also promotes the discovery of features that complement each other. Along the way, it can help discover areas where your customer has an unmet need from you and your competitors. Next, identify the relationship between the VOC and technical specifications to pinpoint what features to build next to satisfy customer needs.