Happy’s Essential Skills: Quality Functional Deployment (QFD)

Estimated 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:

1. Product concept planning, which starts with customers and market research with leads to product plans, ideas, sketches, concept models, and marketing plans. 
2. Product development and specification, which would lead to development to prototypes and tests. 
3. Manufacturing processes and production tools, which are designed based on the product and component specifications. 
4. 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: 

1. Disregard the voice of customer 
2. Disregard the competition 
3. Concentration on each specification in isolation 
4. Low expectations 
5. Little input from design and production people into product planning 
6. Divergent interpretation of the specifications 
7. Lack of structure 
8. Lost information 
9. 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

1. Harvard Business Review, House of Quality, by John R. Hauser and Don Clausing (May/June 1988). 
2. Webducate QFD tutorial
3. C2C Solutions
4. Chen, Chi-Ming and Susanto, Victor, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), IE 361.
5. 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.

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