Quality Function Deployment

Product development knits a new technology or novel idea together with specific customer requirements to fill a corporate strategic need. The customer requirements are deployed through the hierarchy of the product and through time as the technology being embodied in the product is refined.

The deployment of customer requirements into a product involves numerous decisions at all product hierarchical levels. Some useful concepts in understanding the complexity of decisions in product development are the following: Quality Function Deployment (QFD), teamwork, and designation of static/ dynamic status of parts of the product early in the development process.

QFD is one of the many tools existing for Concurrent Engineering. It is a tool to translate the wishes of the customer into technical demands for the product. Demands for the design, funtional demands and process demands originate in these technical demands. With these demands it is possible to fit the wishes of the customer to the product. As a consequence of this it is possible to manufacture a product that fulfils all the needs of a client. Furthermore QFD makes a comparison between the already existing product and the products of the more important competit

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The quality chart is the key to quality deployment. The PDPC method, in response to these kinds of problems, anticipates possible outcomes and prepares countermeasures that will lead to the best possible solutions. Systematic diagrams can be divided into two types: The constituent-component-analysis diagram breaks down the main subject into its basic elements and depicts their relationships to the objectives and means of obtaining those objectives.

Comprehensive QFD include the simultaneous deployment of:

Quality

Technology

Cost

Reliability

The quality deployment component of comprehensive QFD is shown below. " As a very important side benefit, Akao (1990) points out that, when appropriately applied, QFD has demonstrated the reduction of development time by one-half to one-third. It also provides the necessary tie ups between all project levels, to tie it all together and to manage it. strategies may be developed to as many as five successive levels, thus systematically generating many different approaches to solving the problem. Many of the service companies surveyed (32%) were also using QFD.

Together these two purposes create 'Quality function deployment in the broad sense' or Comprehensive Quality Function Deployment. In Japan, the depiction of a roof, or a sidewise roof, on a QFD quality chart represents a deployment, rather than the correlation matrix used in the House of Quality in the USA.

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