FREE online courses on Quality by DesignHouse of Quality

 

The house of quality relates customer attributes to technical features to ensure that all design decisions are based on the customer needs.

 

House of quality development consists of six basic steps:

 

1.                  Identify customer attributes

2.                  Identify technical features

3.                  Relate customer attributes to technical features

4.                  Conduct an evaluation of the competing product

5.                  Evaluate technical features and develop targets

6.                  Determine which technical features to deploy in the remainder of the production process.

 

Identify customer attributes

 

During identification of customer needs, information collected from the customers becomes very important.  In applying QFD, it is important to keep the customer's own words so that they are not misinterpreted by designers and engineers. In many cases, all customers are not end users; in such situations, need of end users and other affected customers should also be collected and attributes should be identified based on complete information.

 

Identify technical features

 

Technical features are design attributes or quality characteristics, expressed in the language of designers and engineers, which form the basis for subsequent design, production, supply and servicing processes.  Technical features should be objective and measurable.

 

Relate the customer attributes to technical features

 

A relationship matrix is developed to show whether final technical features adequately cover the customer attributes.  The assessment is made on the basis of experience of experts, customer responses or controlled experiments. Customer attributes are listed down in the left column of House of Quality and technical features are written across the top.  Some symbols are used in the matrix to indicate the degree of relationship.

 

Technical features can affect several customer attributes. The lack of strong relationship between a customer attribute and relevant technical attribute means the attribute is not adequately addressed and the final product may not be able to meet the customer needs.  If a technical feature does not affect any customer attribute, it may be redundant or the designers might have missed some important customer attributes.

 

Evaluate competing product

 

In this step, importance ratings of each customer attributes are identified and evaluation of the existing competing products is made on each of the attributes.  Competitive evaluation helps in identification of strengths and weaknesses of each product.  This step helps designers to seek opportunities for improvement to make the best product.  By improving the quality of design, the designers can create the most competitive products.

 

Evaluate technical features and develop quality goals

 

Technical features are evaluated by testing of the product and quality goals are set in measurable terms.  These evaluations are compared with competitive evaluation of customer attributes to determine consistency between customer evaluations and technical evaluations.

 

For example, if it is found that a competing product comes out best in the customer attribute, but related technical evaluation does not match with it, then either evaluation measures used are faulty or the product has an image difference that is affecting customer perceptions.  On the basis of customer importance ratings and existing product strengths and weaknesses, goals for each technical feature are fixed.

 

Select technical features to deploy in the remainder of the process

 

In this step, the characteristics that have strong relationships to customer needs, have poor competitive performance or strong selling points are selected. These critical characteristics are to be translated into the language of each function in design and production processes so that proper actions are taken and controls are maintained to meet the customer needs. Other characteristics, which are not so critical to quality, do not need special attention to that extent.