-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- pcb007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueThe Growing Industry
In this issue of PCB007 Magazine, we talk with leading economic experts, advocacy specialists in Washington, D.C., and PCB company leadership to get a well-rounded picture of what’s happening in the industry today. Don’t miss it.
The Sustainability Issue
Sustainability is one of the most widely used terms in business today, especially for electronics and manufacturing but what does it mean to you? We explore the environmental, business, and economic impacts.
The Fabricator’s Guide to IPC APEX EXPO
This issue previews many of the important events taking place at this year's show and highlights some changes and opportunities. So, buckle up. We are counting down to IPC APEX EXPO 2024.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - pcb007 Magazine
Happy’s Essential Skills: Quality Functional Deployment (QFD)
August 24, 2016 | Happy HoldenEstimated reading time: 10 minutes
Figure 3: The original House of Quality example from the Harvard Business Review[1].
Uses and Benefits
The idea of QFD is timing, performance evaluation, and resource commitment. This process continues to a second, third and fourth phase as the “hows” of one stage become the “whats” of the next. Solder reflow thickness—a “how” in the parts house—becomes a “what” in a process planning house. Important process operations, like “squeegee pressure of the stencil screen producing the solder paste” become the “hows.” In the last phase, production planning, the key process operations, like “squeegee pressure of the stencil printer,” become the “whats,” and production requirements—knob controls, operator training, maintenance—become the “hows.”
And the four phases of QFD are:
- Product concept planning, which starts with customers and market research with leads to product plans, ideas, sketches, concept models, and marketing plans.
- Product development and specification, which would lead to development to prototypes and tests.
- Manufacturing processes and production tools, which are designed based on the product and component specifications.
- Production of product that starts after the pilot have been resolved.
Figure 4 shows these phases in a useful diagram[2]. After the products have been marketed, the customer’s voice is taken again.
Figure 4: A useful QFD phase diagram.
Benefits of QFD
According to Don Clausing, author of the book, Total Quality Development (1994), pointing out that the QFD has been evolved by product development people in response to the major problems in the traditional processes, which were:
- Disregard the voice of customer
- Disregard the competition
- Concentration on each specification in isolation
- Low expectations
- Little input from design and production people into product planning
- Divergent interpretation of the specifications
- Lack of structure
- Lost information
- Weak commitment to previous decisions
Tools of QFDs
As written in the Industrial Engineering course 361 at Iowa State by Chen and Susanto (1998)[4]:
Tools of QFD are diagrams, which are very useful to organize the data collected and help to facilitate the improvement process. They can be used to display information about the degree to which employee expectations are being met and the resources that exist to meet those expectations. The structure in which QFD uses to organize information is known as the House of Quality.
In its broadest sense, the QFD House of Quality displays the relationship between dependent (Whats) and independent (Hows) variables[5].
This House of Quality should be created by a team of people with first-hand knowledge of both company capabilities and the expectations of the employee. Effective use of QFD requires team participation and discipline inherent in the practice of QFD, which has proven to be an excellent team-building experience.
Figure 5 shows the QFD Methodology of the Printed Circuit Organization in HP.
Figure 5: The QFD/roadmap phases for the printed circuit organization at Hewlett-Packard (circa 1992).
Conclusions
QFD is a good system to be implemented in organization or industry, which can be seen from the examples mentioned above. QFD does not design to replace the existing organization design process by any means, but rather support the organization’s design process. And it also helps bring the customer’s voice into the production process to reduce the unnecessary cost. Cutting production time is also very beneficial to the companies.
However, QFD has not been widely accepted in the USA compared to Japan (42% or more of Japanese companies have adopted QFD to improve their quality). In the future we hope QFD can be adopted more widely and researched in the American manufacturing and service organizations.
References
- Harvard Business Review, House of Quality, by John R. Hauser and Don Clausing (May/June 1988).
- Webducate QFD tutorial
- C2C Solutions
- Chen, Chi-Ming and Susanto, Victor, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), IE 361.
- Woods, R.C., “Managing to Meet Employee Expectations: Quality Improvement Tools Narrow the Gap Between Employee Expectations and Company Resources,” Human Resource Planning Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994.
Happy Holden has worked in printed circuit technology since 1970 with Hewlett-Packard, NanYa/Westwood, Merix, Foxconn and Gentex. He is the co-editor, with Clyde Coombs, of the recently published Printed Circuit Handbook, 7th Ed. To contact Holden, click here.
Page 2 of 2Suggested Items
Indium Experts to Present on High-Temperature, Lead-Free Solder Paste and High Reliability Liquid Metal Alloys Poster at ECTC
05/16/2024 | Indium CorporationIndium Corporation Research Associate Kyle Aserian will deliver a presentation at the 74th Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) on May 31, in Denver, Colorado.
Indium Experts to Present at Electronics in Harsh Environments SMTA Conference
05/13/2024 | Indium Corporationndium Corporation Technical Manager for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Karthik Vijay, will deliver a technical presentation and Indium Corporation Senior Technologist, Dr. Ronald Lasky, will deliver both a workshop and technical presentation at the Electronics in Harsh Environments SMTA Conference on May 14-16 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Connect the Dots: Designing for Reality—The Pre-Manufacturing Process
05/08/2024 | Matt Stevenson -- Column: Connect the DotsI have been working with Nolan Johnson on a podcast series about designing PCBs for the reality of manufacturing. By sharing lessons learned over a long career in the PCB industry, we hope to shorten learning curves and help designers produce better boards with less hassle and rework. Episode 2 deals with the electronic pre-manufacturing process. Moving from CAD (computer-aided design) to CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) is a key step in PCB manufacturing. CAM turns digital designs into instructions that machines can use to actually build the PCB.
AIM Solder Signs Shinil Fl Ltd. as New Distributor for Korea
05/08/2024 | AIM SolderAIM Solder, a leading global manufacturer of solder assembly materials for the electronics industry, is pleased to announce a new distribution partnership with Shinil Fl Ltd., a prominent supplier of technological solutions in the SMT and semiconductor sectors.
Indium Corporation to Showcase HIA Materials at ECTC
05/07/2024 | Indium CorporationAs an industry leader in innovative materials solutions for semiconductor packaging and assembly, Indium Corporation® will feature its advanced products designed to meet the evolving challenges of heterogeneous integration and assembly (HIA) and fine-pitch system-in-package (SiP) applications at the 74th Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), May 28‒31, in Denver, Colorado.