Quality Function Deployment: The House of Quality.

From a lean perspective the New Product Development process is divided into two macro phases:

– Front Load (also defined “early stage” in R. Cooper’s model “Stage and Gate”) which includes product development planning and conceptual design

– Execution which includes preliminary and detailed design, testing and product launch.

In our opinion the Front Load phase is the most important because investing more time and resources in this phase makes it possible to reduce market risk, or in other words the risk of not being able to meet customers’ needs and expectations.

In addition an accurate front load phase can bring other benefits:

– A shorter lead time in the execution phase;

– Less changes in the last phases of the development process where changes cost much more

– A shorter time between concept design and market launch .

In the Front Load phase and in particular in concept design it is mandatory to understand customers’ needs and this for many reason:

– To design products capable to satisfy not only explicit or implicit customers’ needs but also their latent needs (in this case the probability to be innovative is much higher) ;

– To make it easier to clearly and completely define product specifications.

In this phase it is possible to use a powerful method that makes it easier to convert customers’ needs into guidelines for the Product Development process. This method is called Quality Function Deployment (QFD) , and has been developed in Japan in the sixties by Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno and it is now widely applied in many sectors (aerospace, automotive, ITC, chemical and pharmaceutical, transports etc.)

This method is particularly interesting because it is perfectly in line with Lean Thinking and especially with the first lean principle (Value) which requires that what has value for the customer must always have top priority and must be paid utmost attention.

QFD can benefit a company in many ways:

– Improving communication and coordination among people and functions

– Creating more knowledge (at the end of a project team members have a better knowledge of the market, of products, including those of the competition, and of the production process and its problems)

– Defining product target costs.

Today QFD is recognised as a basic tool of Total Quality Management (TQM), and is used by the most important companies in the world. In spite of all this it is little known and rarely applied by our Small and Medium companies probably because most of them have never thought that lean principles can be applied also in the new product design process.

Quality Function Deployment is applied through a graphic process called (because of its shape) “House of quality”: a number of tables on which all the information needed in the product development process are recorded.

In order to apply the method people must bear in mind a few basic principles:

– The customer is a company’s top priority (the Japanese say the customer is “king”)

– All functions must be involved in the process

– In order to be effective the method must be applied in a correct way.

The “House of quality” is made of 7 rooms, each with a specific function.

Room 1. This room is where the Voice of the Customers and their needs are captured.. The needs can be explicit, implicit or latent.

Room 2. This room is a ‘planning matrix’ in which the needs are evaluated, a benchmark is made with competitors’ products and the team have to set the satisfaction goals for each need.

Room 3. In this room we have the technical answers the product can offer to customers’ need. The project team must translate market needs into technical features which represent the “Voice of the company”.

Room 4. this is a matrix of “relations and priorities”. Team members are required to link customers’ needs to technical features in order to understand the impact of each feature on each individual need.

Room 5 . This room is a ‘correlation matrix’ (characteristics – characteristics), in which the technical characteristics are compared to determinate how they interact with each other (positively or negatively).

Rooms 6 and 7. Technical features are evaluated and the most relevant features are given priority. In particular it is important to identify possible innovations (for instance when there are needs that are not satisfied by any technical feature).

After an accurate benchmark with the most important competitive products, in Room 7 each technical feature is given a specific target in a specific unit of measure.

Our experience with Small and Medium companies tells us that it is essential to follow all the steps of the method, without any exception, and to involve, since the very beginning and to the very end of the project, people from all areas. But above all it is important to train all the people involved on the basics of the method and on its relations with the principles of Lean Thinking.