BUS4101-3

Quality Function Deployment

In previous lessons, you have learned the importance of customer feedback in the process of implementing quality management.

However, the previous discussions have mostly focused on gathering customer feedback and making improvements to an existing to

product or service. Quality Function Deployment (QFD), on the other hand, focuses on designing each new product with customer

input as a main aspect.

QFD is useful in analyzing, evaluating, and incorporating customer needs in the process of designing a product or a service. In other

words, QFD ensures an organization produces what its customers want. The bene�ts of using QFD include customer focus, time

ef�ciency, teamwork orientation, and documentation orientation. The steps involved in implementing QFD include forming the

project team, establishing monitoring procedures, selecting a project, conducting a kickoff meeting, training the project team, and

developing the matrices.

Tools for QFD

To help identify and incorporate customer inputs, QFD involves the use of traditional quality tools as well as several specialized tools, such as the af�nity diagram, the interrelationship digraph, the tree diagram, and the matrix diagram.

Af�nity Diagram

It is used to promote creative thinking and the �nding of new and different approaches to continuous improvement.

Interrelationship Digraph

It is used to logically identify relationships among different ideas.

Tree Diagram

It is used to identify all the tasks that must be completed in order to solve a problem.

Matrix Diagram

It is used to identify and graphically represent connections among such things as responsibilities, tasks, and functions.

The elements of QFD are somewhat complicated and interrelated.  Careful attention should be paid to each of the four tools that

make up the QFD matrices.  Search for and study example of each of the �gures.