Quality Function Deployment - House of Quality

The aim of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is to transform qualitative customer requirements into quantitative parameters. Along the product development process, QFD deploys functions forming quality as well as methods, subsystems and ultimately component parts or even specific elements of the manufacturing process for achieving design quality.

The House of Quality (HOQ), as basic design tool in QFD, is originally a product planning matrix that is used to visualize how your customer requirements relate directly to the actions you can take to achieve those requirements. Therefore, the HOQ serves as a Roadmap describing the process from initial idea to final product or service specifics.

The House of Quality (1) identifies CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS and classifies the importance of those, (2) identifies TECHNICAL PRODUCT FEATURES, which may be relevant to meet the customer requirements, (3) correlates the customer requirements and technical product features (INTERRELATIONSHIP MATRIX), (4) allows technical verification of those correlations (CORRELATION MATRIX), (5) rates how your CUSTOMER perceives your competition’s ability to meet the requirements, and then (6) assigns necessary PERFORMANCE TARGETS (specs) and priorities for the system requirements.

The strategic benefits for organizations of developing an HOQ are

• to organize and prioritize the organization’s efforts to satisfy their customer’s requirements,
• to focus the development as well as to steer the development process using specific and quantifiable targets and metrics, and
• to drive - forced by a documented baseline of customer’s requirements - everything for the purpose of developing the best possible design.

A few advantages for organizations of operating an HOQ can be

• reducing the time required for the design process,
• reducing design changes respectively revisions, and ultimately
• reducing time to market for your product or service.

Yoji Akao, the developer of QFP, did not want his method to be copied matrix by matrix, indicating that QFD should remain flexible and adapt new need-based functionalities. Equipped with this methodical basic design tool of Quality Function Deployment, I will try to evaluate industrial standards and methods and discuss industrial KPIs for the use within an Academic Research Impact Cockpit (ARIC) of multiple prioritized KPIs for academic bench marking.