QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT WITH COLLABRATIVE NEW PRODUCT DESIGN

CONTENTSWhat is Quality Function Deployment?Application of Quality Function DeploymentBenefits of Quality Function DeploymentPhases of Quality Function DeploymentThe House of QualitySteps to the House of QualityMeaning and Examples: Voice of CustomerExamples About House of Quality

WHAT IS QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT?

Quality Function Deployment is a quality development method which is used for new product design or improvement of existing product and at the same time.

In order to stay in competitive market, the companies try new approaches and put the successful ones into application. One of the widely used approaches is, today, Quality Function Deployment (QFD).

THE THREE MAIN GOALS IN IMPLEMENTING QFD :

Prioritize spoken and unspoken customer wants and needs.

Translate these needs into technical characteristics and specifications.

Build and deliver a quality product or service by focusing everybody toward customer satisfaction.

QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT HAS HELPED TO TRANSFORM THE WAY MANY COMPANIES:

Plan new products

Design product requirements

Determine process characteristics

Control the manufacturing process

Document already existing product specifications

APPLICATIONS OF QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENTIt can be used for,

a product,

a new service

available for a product

for investment planning

for process management

technology-driven engineering

even can be used for policy management

BENEFITS OF QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENTCustomer Deployement

The focus is on customers wants, not what the company thinks the customer wants.  The "Voice of the Customer" drives the development process.

Competitive analysis

Other products in the marketplace are examined, and the company product is rated against the competition.

Reduced development time

Careful attention to customer requirements reduces the risk that changes will be required late in the project life cycle.  Time is not spent developing insignificant functions and features.

Documentation

 A knowledge base is built as the QFD process is implemented.  A historical record of the decision-making process is developed.

PHASES OF QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENTPhase 1, Product Planning

Phase 1, or product planning, is also called The House of Quality.

Phase 2, Product Design

Product design requires creativity and innovative team ideas.

Phase 3, Process Planning:

During process planning, manufacturing processes are flowcharted and process parameters (or target values) are documented.

Phase 4, Process Control:

In this phase decisions are made as to

which process poses the most risk and controls are put in place to prevent

failures.

THE HOUSE OF QUALITY :The House of Quality translates customer requirements,

based on marketing research and benchmarking data, into an appropriate number of engineering targets to be met by a new product design.

STEPS TO THE HOUSE OF QUALITY :

THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER’

The initial steps in forming the House of Quality include determining, clarifying, and specifying the customers’ needs.

What do customers expect from clothes pin?

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:

The next step of the QFD process is identifying what the customer wants and what must be achieved to satisfy these wants. In addition, regulatory standards and requirements dictated by management must be identified. Once all requirements are identified it is important to answer what must be done to the product design to fulfill the necessary requirements.

PLANNING MATRIX:

The planning matrix shows the weighted importance of each requirement that the team and its competitors are attempting to fulfill. Customer ratings, typically ranging from 1 to 5, are given to each company under each requirement. The customer ratings are combined with the weighted performance of each demand to produce an overall performance measure for the companies.

INTERRELATIONSHIP MATRIX The main function of the interrelationship matrix is to establish a connection

between the customer’s product requirements and the performance measures designed to improve the product.

The team asks the question, "what is the strength of the relationship between the technical descriptors and the customers needs?" Relationships can either be weak, moderate, or strong and carry a numeric value of 1, 3 or 9.

TECHNICAL CORRELATION MATRİX

This room in the matrix is where the term House of Quality comes from because it makes the matrix look like a house with a roof. The correlation matrix is probably the least used room in the House of Quality; however, this room is a big help to the design engineers in the next phase of a comprehensive QFD project. Team members must examine how each of the technical descriptors impact each other. The team should document strong negative relationships between technical descriptors and work to eliminate physical contradictions.

TECHNICAL PROPERTIES AND TARGETS:

The technical properties matrix uses specific items to record the priorities assigned to technical requirements. It also provides a technical performance achieved by competitive products and the degree of difficulty in developing each requirement.

CONCLUSIONThrough customer needs and competitive analysis, the House of Quality helps to identify the critical technical components that require change.

VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER (VOC)The best proven methodology, for understanding what customer really wants is Voice of the Customer.

FOUR PRIMARY COMPONENTS OF A VOC BUSINESS PROCESS:

QFD & CUSTOMER

1200W Hard Bonnet Hair Dryer (Individualization studies for commercial products)

Infrared hair-drying lamp Considering new alternatives for conventional systems to develop new products or services.

A research has been made in this study with people who are mostly employed and aged between 20 and 30. Considering the results of the research that has been made for potential customers, a new hairdryer product design can be based on the customer requirements. For example, a hairdryer which dries quickly is an important factor in the voice of customer and new hairdryer designs can be implemented with a new approach instead of making improvements on ordinary hairdryer designs.

QFD AND THE NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

In a true quality system, we needed to address not only the quality of the products being designed and produced, but the quality of the new product development (NPD) process itself that creates those products. In other words, not just the quality of an assembly of parts, but the quality of the human activities needed to design and produce those parts human activities such as product planning, marketing, engineering, procurement, testing, manufacturing, packaging, after-sales support, etc. The quality function must be deployed across all the company.

In product or process improvement activities such as kaizen , six sigma , etc. the focus is on existing products in production that fail to meet internal quality standards or fail in the field. This is definitely in the realm of the quality department to address. In new product development (NPD), however, there is no design, product, manufacturing process, and so forth yet, so it is unrealistic to wait until there is in order for the quality department to do its job.

In NPD, quality must begin before design, when the business case is being developed that defines the scope and financial deliverables of the project, who the key customers are and how they are to be researched, what is the project timeline and what are the resource and budget constraints, etc.

The only way quality can be assured is for organization functions to work together from the start.

This is what is called cross-functional management (CFM) and it is one cornerstone of total quality management (TQM); QFD is the CFM system for assuring new NPD quality by deploying the quality function across the total organization.

FIRST EXAMPLE:1.An Automobile Bumper

Customer Request:

There is too much damage to bumpers in low-speed collisions. Customer wants a better bumper.

Step 1: Identify Customer(s)

Repair Department

Automobile Owner Manufacturing

Plant Sales Force

Step 2: Determine Customer Requirements/Constraints I want something that

looks nice (basic) It must hold my license

plate (performance) I want it strong enough not

to dent (excitement) It must protect my tail-

lights and head-lights (performance)

I don’t want to pay too much (basic)

Step 3: Prioritize Customer Requirements

PUT PRIORITIZED CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS INTO A HOUSE OF QUALITY CHART

Step 4: Competition Benchmarking Identify Competitors Test and Analyze Competitor Products Reverse Engineer Competitor Products Rate Competitor Products against customer requirements/constraints

Put competitive benchmarking information

into

House of Quality Chart

Requirements into Measurable Engineering Specifications and define target values

Specify how license plate will be held Specify how to resist dents through material yield strength, young's modulus, etc. Specify with a dollar amount the term ‘inexpensive’

AN AUTOMOBIL BUMPER:

SECOND EXAMPLE2.ICE TEA MAKER

Figure 1 shows an electrical appliance: an Ice-tea maker. We will use the QFD to study

how to improve its design. The operation is as follows: Add tea leaves to the steeping

basket, and cool water to the tank, and switch on the machine. The water from the tank

enters the heating chamber, where an electrical coil boils it. The steam pushes the how

water through a tube to the steeping basket. The hot water seeps through the tea leaves,

and the tea drips down into the jar. Finally, the ice-tea is prepared by adding sugar,

lemon, and ice to the tea in the jar, and mixing.

Based on surveys, the customer requirements are identified; subsequent analysis of the

surveys yields the relative importance. Based on the engineering analysis of the design,

the corresponding technical features that must be modified are identified. Usually, for

each customer requirement, there will be one or more technical feature.

Now we proceed to the next steps: Benchmarking and analysis based on engineering and

technical evaluations of what TP’s we can aim to modify by changing some design

modules.The technical difficulty of each objective is assigned a numerical rating by the engineers

who are in charge of the design of the modules related to this parameter. The team also

consults each other to standardize their relative ratings.

NOTES:1)Technical difficulty values are relative numbers assigned by engineering teams

2)The right hand side shows comparison of consumer preferences to design of competing products. These numbers are relative, and based on statistics from customer surveys.

3)The ‘roof’ of the House is completed by identification of inter-related TP’s – there are four types of inter-relationships of concern, these are described in the table below.

HOW TO USE THE HOUSE OF QUALITYOnce the house is completely constructed, it provides a guideline for decisions on

Which design features should be modified or upgraded first. If there is unlimited

time and money, we would like to upgrade all the features that can be technically

improved.

However, this may not be the best strategy:A competitor may introduce a new product and capture some of the potential market

while we are trying to improve our product.It may be better to provide sequential upgrades to tempt earlier users to buy a new

machines once in every few time periods (for example, digital camera companies used

this technique very effectively in the last few years).

Thus, with budget and time constraints, the House of quality provides the design team

with information to prioritize the important (in terms of customer demand) design

changes.