House 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
