Managing Quality

Chapter 16. Quality Function Deployment

I. Ferguson and B. G. Dale

Introduction

The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methodology was developed in Japan at Kobe Shipyard, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as a way to incorporate knowledge about the needs and desires of customers into all stages of the design, manufacture, delivery and support of products and services. It is an integrated methodology where all relationships and priorities can be understood and reconciled to the benefit of the customer and producer company. It arose out of a need to achieve simultaneously a competitive advantage in quality, cost and delivery (QCD). These, along with people and environmental factors, are the key performance measures of superior-performing Japanese companies and such organizations use QFD as a matter of course in design and new product development. To take the conception of the product or service into reality requires choices of many aspects of product or service design, which means 'trading off' the high performance of one aspect of the design against another so that the product will be successful for the business and also in the market. This requires good, reliable, benchmarked information available from areas such as:

• Customer needs

• Functionality

• Costs and capital

• Reliability

• Reproducibility

• Manufacturing needs to satisfy postulated quantities per time period

These are critical demands of any design, and how well each separate demand is integrated within the whole determines the success of the ...