Applying Quality Function Deployment

Applying Quality Function Deployment

Quality Function Deployment is a technique to incorporate “customer’s voice” into the design.

Target area:  Quality Management System Development

Before we move on to applying QFD to QMS , let us understand the basic concepts which were used during the process.

Customer’s voice:

From customer’s perspective , what are important factors that will contribute to meet the quality requirements of the product.

Capturing Customer’s voice for QMS:

QMS basically has direct internal customers who can be top management, project management, development teams, and support teams. QMS is essential for strategy and day to day execution or operations within any organisation.

End customer is also the user of the quality management system who is concerned that adequate means are going to be used to develop the product and to check that it meets requirements.

Brainstorming:

Brainstorming is a method for generating ideas. Participants focus on a problem or on an opportunity and come up with as many ideas as possible and push the ideas as far as possible.

After brainstorming, team can analyse the results and explore best ideas.

CTQ (Critical to Quality):

Elements of a process that significantly affect the output of that process. Identifying these elements is vital to figuring out how to make the improvements that can dramatically reduce costs and enhance quality

XY Matrix:

It is also called as house of quality. It shows relation between y and x where y =f(X);

Step by step approach 

1. Identify target area (usually it is the product)
2. Use brainstorming to determine voice of customer to identify customer requirements ( From customer perspective)
3. Use brainstorming to identify design requirements which are critical to quality (From development perspective)
4. Draw XY Chart as Customer Requirements on Y axis and design requirements on X axis
5. Provide importance rating to Customer CTQ ( as in example 10 being to the most important and 1 to the least)
6. Assign Scores and Symbols as per Relationship Matrix. This denotes how is the correlation if there is strong positive correlation the highest score is given. Symbols used to make it easier for the team for the assignment
7. Use brainstorming method to judge and assign the scores symbol to each x (design CTQ) for every y (Customer CTQ) .
8. Compute the scores for every item on Y by multiplying the importance rating with symbol’s score value.
9. Determine the total importance weight-ages for every design CTQ.
10. Finally, CTQs are arranged as per their highest importance weight-ages scores to prioritize.

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Conclusion:

1. QFD is highly significant for product design and process mapping.  QFD approach helps to identify how every customer requirements relates with its corresponding design requirement. It also helps in prioritize as per importance of all requirements.

2. XY Matrix is the best way to represent the pictorial view of the overall process. It helps to collect data in a very simple format and quickly determine how the co- relation exists between the two CTQs on Y and X axis.