Quality Function Deployment

Product development knits a new technology or novel idea together with specific customer requirements to fill a corporate strategic need. The customer requirements are deployed through the hierarchy of the product and through time as the technology being embodied in the product is refined.

The deployment of customer requirements into a product involves numerous decisions at all product hierarchical levels. Some useful concepts in understanding the complexity of decisions in product development are the following: Quality Function Deployment (QFD), teamwork, and designation of static/ dynamic status of parts of the product early in the development process.

QFD is one of the many tools existing for Concurrent Engineering. It is a tool to translate the wishes of the customer into technical demands for the product. Demands for the design, funtional demands and process demands originate in these technical demands. With these demands it is possible to fit the wishes of the customer to the product. As a consequence of this it is possible to manufacture a product that fulfils all the needs of a client. Furthermore QFD makes a comparison between the already existing product and the products of the more important competitors.

The Definition of Quality Function Deployment:

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a way of making the 'voice of the customer' heard throughout an organization. It is a systematic process for capturing customer requirements and translating these into requirements that must be met throughout the 'supply chain'. The result is a new set of target values for designers, production people, and even suppliers to aim at in order to produce the output desired by customers.

QFD is particularly valuable when design trade-offs are necessary to achieve the best overall solution, e.g. because some requirements conflict with others. QFD also enables a great deal of information to be summarized in the form of one or more charts. These charts capture customer and product data gleaned from many sources, as well as the design parameters chosen for the new product. In this way they provide a solid foundation for further improvement in subsequent