“Creating Customer-Centric Products with Quality Function Deployment (QFD)”

Unlocking Customer-Centric Product Development with Quality Function Deployment

In today’s competitive market, creating products that meet customer needs is crucial for success. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a methodology that helps organizations prioritize the voice of the customer (VOC) throughout the product development process. By using a structured approach, QFD ensures that customer needs and preferences are taken into account, resulting in products that satisfy the target audience.

What is Quality Function Deployment?

QFD is a methodology that gathers customer requirements and translates them into products or services. It emphasizes listening to customers’ needs and wants before deciding on product features or services. The QFD methodology supplements an organization’s current design process, analyzing relationships between customer desires, product design, and technical requirements.

Key Components of QFD

Before diving into the QFD process, it’s essential to understand its key components:

• House of Quality: A core tool of QFD, containing several “rooms” that create a house-shaped matrix. The rooms include:
  • Left side: List of customer-requested features with weighted importance
  • Right side: Competitive analysis with weighted strengths and weaknesses
  • Attic: Control factors, such as product design or engineering
  • Main room: Relationship matrix, scoring the relationship between customer-requested features and control factors
  • Roof: Interrelationship section, describing the relationship between control factors
  • Foundation: Importance rating, calculated by evaluating the column of a control factor
• Voice of the Customer (VOC): A summary of customers’ needs, wants, preferences, and desires associated with a product or service. Developing the VOC involves creating a solid market research report, gathering customer feedback through surveys, user interviews, focus groups, reviews, feature requests, sales feedback, and product analytics.

The 4 Phases of Quality Function Deployment

The QFD methodology consists of four phases, each with a specific focus:

1. Product Planning: Gathering customer feedback, identifying control factors, and conducting competitive analysis to pinpoint features to build next.
2. Product Development: Recognizing key parts or specs to build a feature, incorporating customer requirements into product design, and ensuring design consistency and quality.
3. Process Planning: Identifying processes necessary to build features and deliver functionality, discovering which process will have the best impact on creating product specs.
4. Process Quality Control: Identifying the best way to check the quality of processes, determining which controls are most useful, and creating quality targets.

Example of Quality Function Deployment

Here’s a general example of how product teams can implement the QFD methodology:

• Develop the VOC by gathering customer feedback
• Create the House of Quality matrix, adding customer-requested features, control factors, and competitive analysis
• Identify the relationship between the VOC and control factors, assigning a strong, medium, or low relationship score
• Review the interrelationships of control factors and calculate the importance rating
• Analyze the results, prioritizing features that meet customer needs

Role of QFD in Product Development

Quality Function Deployment helps product development teams create customer-centric products by:

• Prioritizing the VOC throughout the product development process
• Promoting the discovery of features that complement each other
• Aligning the company’s potential with customer wants and needs

While QFD offers many benefits, it also has some drawbacks, including complexity, potential overemphasis on customer opinions, and costs associated with gathering customer feedback and processing data.