The unique approach of QFD is its ability to integrate customer demands with the technical aspects of a service. Hence, QFD is not only a methodological tool but also a concept that provides a means of translating customer requirements in each stage of service development Chan and Wu, Voice of Customer VOC :. The voice of the customer is defined as the identification, structuring, and prioritization of customer needs Griffin and Hauser, Customer needs are measured in terms of consequences, which are determined by asking customers directly what they are looking for in a product or service.
Then, the customer consequences are assessed and technical requirements are developed by knowledgeable professionals associated with the specific field of the product or service being assessed. The technical requirements are design dimensions that are specifically made to meet the customer consequences developed from the VOC. For example, if a customer consequence was better fuel economy associated with a vehicle , perhaps a technical requirement would be the fuel type or weight of the vehicle that would directly be associated with the customer consequence.
Multiple analysts should review the transcripts of the focus groups to identify group synergies. The survey then asks the participant to rate an existing product or service on a scale of 1 to 5 on how well they view the product or service performs on each customer consequence.
The participant is also asked to weight how important each customer consequence is to them for the product or service. A weighted rating can then be obtained by multiplying the rating and weight assigned to each customer consequence so that prioritization can be assessed. For example, a customer consequence could be discovered to be very important to a participant, but they view the product or service as performing poorly.
This consequence would have priority to address over a consequence that the participant viewed as having a high rating on performance yet it was not seen as important.
The next discussion refers to the House of Quality, which is the tool used for organizing the customer consequences and subsequent technical requirements developed to address those consequences. House of Quality HOQ :. Olewnik and Lewis report that the HOQ is a design tool that supports information processing and decision making in the engineering design process. They note that for companies just implementing QFD and the HOQ, there is undoubtedly an improvement in information structure, flow, and direction.
Hauser and Clausing state that the principal benefit of the HOQ is increasing the quality focus of the organization. That is, the HOQ gets people within an organization thinking in the right direction and thinking together. QFD uses a set of interrelated matrix diagrams. The first matrix is the HOQ, which converts the customer consequences into technical requirements that must be fulfilled throughout the supply chain.
The starting point on the left of the house is the identification of basic customer consequences. The next step is the definition of the priority levels that customers assign to these needs. These priorities are translated into numeric values that indicate relative importance, as discussed earlier.
The section just below the roof states the technical requirements used to meet the customer consequences. The relationship between the customer consequences and technical requirements constitutes the main body of the HOQ, called the relationship matrix.
This matrix helps identify certain technical requirements that should be given priority if one addresses multiple customer consequences. The correlation matrix defines the relationships among technical requirements, which is represented by the roof of the HOQ.
The bottom of the house evaluates the competition in terms of technical requirements in which the target values are defined by the researcher in this matrix Tan and Pawitra, The construction of each of the sections in the HOQ is discussed in the following sections. Figure 1 depicts a standard HOQ. The following section of this paper will outline a standard generic methodology for conducting a QFD analysis, which includes obtaining the VOC and translating it into meaningful data using an HOQ.
HOQ Model Cohen, QFD involves the construction of one or more matrices, called quality tables, which ensure customer satisfaction and improved quality services at every level of the service development process. The House of Quality, one of the most commonly used matrices in the QFD methodology, is a toolbox of decision matrices and the customer requirements and competitive benchmarks are utilized for decision-making Andronikidis et al.
The step-by-step process for the development of the HOQ is discussed in detail in the following sections. One of the essential strategies for successful functioning of any organization is delivering superior service or product quality to their customers. The first step towards understanding customer needs is to identify attributes and customer consequences.
Attributes are defined as the physical or abstract characteristics of a service or product. Customers judge services and products based on their consequences, not their attributes. In other words, customers judge a service or product on its outcome, or affect of use on them. A service or product has many attributes, and each may have more than one consequence Fisher and Schutta, To gather the VOC, a cross-functional team must conduct focus groups or interviews with a select group of potential, existing, or past customers and ask them what is important to them in the service or product being offered.
This is the fundamental customer consequence that the customer wants from using the service or product. These responses are grouped using an affinity diagram and used to develop a meaningful survey questionnaire that captures all things important to the customers. Development of Customer Consequences. During the survey, the respondents are asked to evaluate the particular product or service provider on each customer consequence on a standard 5 point Likert scale.
The respondent is also asked to weight each consequence on how important it is to them on a 5 point Likert scale. These ratings and weightings will be multiplied to derive a weighted rating to encompass both the performance rating and the importance for each consequence.
With this information, the team can determine which of the consequences are the most important and also the worst in performance and assign priorities. If respondents for other similar types of products or services are available, the same survey can gather data regarding customer consequences for those competitors. If respondents are not available, the team will use available data i.
Development of Technical Requirements. After the customer consequences are analyzed, the next step in the construction of the HOQ is the development of the technical requirements. The technical requirements are the design specifications that satisfy customer consequences.
The technical requirements must be within the control of the product or service provider and must be measurable i. Each customer consequence can have more than one technical requirement, and each technical requirement may fulfill the need of more than one customer consequence.
The development of technical requirements often requires expertise in the area regarding the service or product and requires creativity to develop. Any reasonable technical requirement should be considered. Often times ambiguous research and information collected from many sources i.
Once the customer consequences are developed, survey results are gathered, and the technical requirements are developed, a matrix to highlight relationships between the customer consequences and the technical requirements is constructed.
The matrix defines the correlations between the customer consequences and technical requirements as strong, moderate, or weak using a scale. Each customer consequence is matched with any applicable technical requirement; make note that relationships should not be forced, leaving a blank if no relationship is determined.
Here again, this assignment of relationships requires the expertise of the researchers or industry members. This matrix identifies the technical requirements that satisfy most customer consequences. The technical requirements that address the most customer consequences should be a main priority in the design process to ensure a product or service that satisfies the stated customer expectations.
Planning Matrix Customer Competitive Analysis. After the completion of the relationship matrix, the focus of the analysis shifts to the construction of the planning matrix. The planning matrix defines how each customer consequence has been addressed by the competition.
It provides market data, facilitates strategic goal setting for the new product, and permits comparison of the customer desires and needs. It also compares the service to its key competitors. For the competitive analysis, research should be conducted regarding similar products or services.
Researchers may have to assert a level of expertise in drawing meaningful information from the information available, as many competitors will not openly aid their competition by providing market data and design specifications.
The researchers will use available data i. Technical Correlations. Following the completion of the relationship and planning matrices, the technical correlations are determined.
These correlations are depicted in the roof of the HOQ. The roof maps the relationships and interdependencies among the technical requirements. The analysis of which informs the development process, revealing the existence and nature of service or product design bottlenecks.
The relationships among technical requirements are plotted and given a value. Relationships among the technical requirements are important to evaluate, as one technical requirement could either aid or hinder the success of another crucial technical requirement in meeting customer consequences. Past experience and publicly available data i. Symbols are used to represent the strength of the relationship between the technical requirements and are assigned by the team. Technical Matrix.
The last step in the formation of the HOQ is the foundation or bottom of the house. This foundation is referred to as the technical matrix. The collected information from the above methods enables the development of strategic decisions, one of which is the allocation of resources. An importance-performance grid can be developed to prioritize the usage of resources to improve the most critical customer benefits. The mean importance ratings gathered from the survey can be plotted on the vertical axis importance and the mean customer competitive ratings gathered from the survey on the horizontal axis performance.
Using the importance rating values, the mean importance rating for all consequences should be calculated. The consequences with an importance rating higher than that of the mean importance rating should be placed above the horizontal line and those lower should be placed below this line.
After these values are plotted, the focus can shift to the distribution of consequences on either the left or right side of the vertical line.
For this purpose, the mean performance rating is used and labeled for the vertical axis. Each consequence with a lower mean should be plotted to the left of the axis, and each consequence with a performance mean higher than the mean should be plotted to the right of the vertical axis.
This section describes each of these tools in detail. The Kano model is a theory of customer satisfaction developed in the s by Noriaki Kano Kano et al. During interviews and focus groups, it can be difficult to elicit from customers clear expressions of the consequences that are important to them.
Attributes are the physical or abstract characteristics of the product or service where as consequences are the results of using the service. Sometimes customers are not even aware of important consequences Fisher and Schutta, The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction. Kano et al.
Must be requirements can be defined as the basic attributes of quality in terms of customer satisfaction. In other words, they are a necessary but insufficient condition for customer satisfaction Busacca and Padula, One-dimensional requirements are related to product or service performance; they create customer satisfaction when present and dissatisfaction when absent Redfern and Davey, One-dimensional requirements are both a necessary and sufficient condition for customer satisfaction Busacca and Padula, Attractive requirements can be defined as the product or service attributes that satisfy or even excite customers when present but do not dissatisfy when absent Berger et al.
Such attributes have the greatest influence on customer satisfaction with a given service Matzler et al. They are a sufficient, but unnecessary condition for satisfaction Busacca and Padula, QFD normally deals with satisfiers not delighters. Zhao and Dholakia have reported that although one-dimensional i. Figure 2 illustrates the three different consequences and indicates the extent to which they can affect customer satisfaction.
Kano Model. Initially, Parasuraman et al. However, in the early s, these were condensed into five. With the help of SERVQUAL, customer satisfaction can be measured in terms of the difference, or gap, between the expected and perceived level of performance.
This approach can be applied to any service organization to evaluate the standards of quality for the services provided. Research conducted by Baki et al. SERVQUAL is a reliable and valid scale used to measure the perceived and expected levels of performance in any service organizations and thus results in improved service offerings. It can be used to identify and analyze customer requirements and thus forms the first stage in the construction of an HOQ.
As noted by Parasuraman et at. This case study integrates quality function deployment and the Kano model to examine the application of quality function deployment in the new product development process by using the production of a fuel efficient vehicle.
An integrated team of marketers, design engineers, and business experts developed a House of Quality for the fuel efficient vehicle that provided an insight into the customer preferences to be concentrated on and the technical requirements that helped achieve desired results in the prototyping of a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle HFCV.
The product that was being developed was a plug-in hybrid. The first step in obtaining the VOC for this case study was to conduct interviews, which was used to derive a customer survey. The interviews were one-on-one conversations conducted with customers to determine their expectations from a vehicle.
The purpose of the interview process was not to ask each customer all ten questions, but to promote the customer to talk. When the subject stopped talking, the next question would get the conversation flowing again. Seventeen customer consequences were developed from the interview data. Affinity Diagram. After the VOC had been gathered via the interview process, the collected data was organized using affinity diagrams.
Affinity diagrams group the consequences gathered based on similarity to clarify customer input. The 17 consequences were grouped into six similar categories, and each category was given a title.
The left side of the HOQ was completed with customer consequences and attributes. The affinity diagram is shown in Table 1. The next step was to obtain the importance rating and rankings of each consequence from the customer base. A survey was conducted of customers regarding the relative importance of the 17 consequences. Customers do not place equal importance on all consequences. The identities of the three vehicles were not disclosed to the survey respondents. A brief description of each vehicle was provided however, to allow them to make a nonbiased decision on ratings and rankings of each consequence, relative to each vehicle.
Each respondent was asked to read the descriptions and provide rating and rankings for each vehicle. The survey was conducted in two parts.
All other consequences were to be assigned a value rank between 1 and 10, relative to the consequence labelled as most important. The mean of the rankings was calculated for the results of each consequence that constituted the importance column in Table 2. The second part of the survey involved rating each consequence as it applies to each of the four vehicles on a Likert scale from 1 to 5. The mean of the ratings was calculated for each consequence and noted in the rating column in Table 2.
The weighted rating values were obtained by multiplication of the importance rank and rating together. The weighted rating is a means of obtaining an optimal solution by evaluating both what is important to a customer and how well the customer thinks each product is doing on what is important to them.
This is also used as a means to evaluate resource allocations, as if the customer base feels that a company is lacking on a consequence that they deem very important, more focus can be applied to improving this, which may ultimately improve market share. Conversely, if a customer base feels that a product excels on consequences that are of no importance to them, resources can be directed away from these areas and applied to areas needing improvement.
The results of the survey are tabulated in Table 2. After the customer consequences were analyzed, the next step in the construction of the HOQ was the development of technical requirements. The technical requirements are the design specifications that satisfy customer needs. Each consequence can have one or more technical requirement. Technical requirements must be within the control of the manufacturer. Brainstorming among marketers and product designers was used to develop the technical requirements, along with various Internet sources for references to industry standards.
Thirty technical requirements were developed and organized using tree diagrams. One of the seven management tools, the tree diagram is a hierarchical structure of ideas built from the top down using a logic and analytical thought process.
A customer design matrix log was then developed that created a product development log that provided a history of the design process. For instance, technology enables smaller keypads in mobile phones, making the end product more compact. However, potential phone users require a certain level of keypad size to be able to use their phone effectively. QFD helps you determine exactly what your customer wants and how this input can be used in new product development.
QFD is an important planning tool for introducing new products. With QFD, the final product requirements are already in place, so an engineering team works backward to incorporate technical specifications in the design. This is product planning. The next step is process planning, which identifies the processes needed to get a desired end result. Finally, QFD helps in production planning, which sets up process control and maintenance plans.
QFD dictates product design and manufacturing standards from the concept stage. Because you know your final product characteristics, you can check whether production is proceeding along the right lines using intermittent reviews.
You can address any problems at an early stage of production, dramatically enhancing your production efficiency. Also called: matrix product planning, decision matrices , customer-driven engineering.
Every organization has customers. Some have only internal customers, some have only external customers, and some have both. When you are working to determine what you need to accomplish to satisfy or even delight your customers, quality function deployment is an essential tool. QFD is a focused methodology for carefully listening to the voice of the customer and then effectively responding to those needs and expectations.
First developed in Japan in the late s as a form of cause-and-effect analysis, QFD was brought to the United States in the early s. It gained its early popularity as a result of numerous successes in the automotive industry. In QFD, quality is a measure of customer satisfaction with a product or a service.
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