Information AboutQfd |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT | |
| anticipatory thinking | |
| decision theory | |
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Quality function deployment or "QFD" is a flexible and comprehensive Decision Making technique used in Product or Service development, Brand Marketing , and Product Management . QFD can strongly help an Organization focus on the critical characteristics of a new or existing product or service from the separate viewpoints of the customer Market Segments , company, or technology-development needs. The results of the technique yield transparent and visible Graphs and Matrices that can be reused for future product/service developments. The focus for the practice and advancement of the technique is The QFD Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to dissemination and advancement of QFD through on-going R&D, current best practices and tools, and QFD education programs. HISTORY QFD was originally developed by Drs. Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno in the early 1960s . The House of Quality did not appear until 1972 in the design of an oil tanker by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. As Akao has reiteratied numerous times, a House of Quality is not QFD, it is just an example of one tool. Other tools extend the analysis beyond quality to cost, technology, reliability, function, parts, technology, manufacturing, and service deployments. In addition, the same technique can extend the method into the constituent product Subsystem s, Configuration Item s, assemblies, and parts. From these detail level components, fabrication and assembly process QFD charts can be developed to support Statistical Process Control techniques. ABOUT THE TECHNIQUE QFD transforms standard which focuses on customer satisfaction. Acquiring market needs by listening to the Voice of Customer (VOC), sorting the needs, and numerically prioritizing them (using techniques such as the , Ford , Daimler Chrysler ) and their suppliers, IBM , Raytheon , Boeing , Lockheed Martin , and many others. Since its early use in the United States, QFD met with initial enthusiasm then plummeting popularity when it was discovered that much time could be wasted if poor group decision making techniques were employed. Organizational culture/corporate culture has an effect on the ability to change organizational human processes and on the sustainability of the changes. In particular, in organizations exhibiting strong cultural norms and rich sets of Tacit Assumption s that prevent objective discussion of historical courses of action, QFD may be resisted due to its ability to expose tacit assumptions and Unspoken Rules . See Organizational Culture and Edgar Schein . It has been suggested that a Learning Organization can more easily overcome these issues due to the more transparent nature of the organizational culture and to the readiness of the membership to discuss relevant Cultural Norms . Results of QFD analysis have been applied in Japan and elsewhere into deploying the high-impact controllable factors in (MBO), but adds a significant element in the goal setting process, called "catchball". Use of these Hoshin techniques by U.S. companies such as Hewlett Packard have been successful in focusing and aligning company resources to follow stated strategic goals throughout an organizational hierarchy. While originally developed for manufacturing industries, interest in the use of QFD-based ideas in software development commenced with seminal work by R. J. Thackeray {Link without Title} and G. Van Treeck "QFD for Embedded Systems and Software Product Development," in GOAL/QPC 6th Annual Conference Proceedings (Boston: GOAL/QPC, 1989), for example in Object-oriented Programming (Lamia 1995) and Use Case driven software development (Denney 2005). Since the early introduction of QFD, the technique has been developed to shorten the time span and reduce the required group efforts (such as Richard Zultner's Blitz QFD® ). SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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