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W. Edwards Deming is widely credited with planting the seeds of statistical process quality control in Japan. The Japanese, as willing learners, carried forward his use of data-driven management into broader company-wide applications.1 One of these applications, quality function deployment (QFD), applies Deming's quality principles (see "Deming's 14 Points" in the online supplement to this article) to the field of new product development. The goal of QFD is to uncover positive quality that will excite the customer, and then to ensure the quality of all downstream activities in design, manufacturing, service, etc.
Fundamentals of QFD
Traditional approaches to ensuring quality typically focus on solving problems within the work process, whether it is manufacturing, service, or software. Consistency and an absence of problems, however, are often insufficient to create lasting value for the customer, especially when customers are more demanding. With traditional quality approaches, the best we can get is nothing wrong-but is this good enough? In addition to eliminating negative quality, we must also maximize positive quality throughout the organization. This creates value, which leads to customer satisfaction.
QFD is a comprehensive quality system aimed specifically at satisfying the customer. It concentrates on maximizing customer satisfaction (positive quality) by seeking out both spoken and unspoken needs, translating these into actions and designs, and communicating these throughout the organization (see "QFD Aligns Development Efforts to Ensure Value to Customer" in the online supplement). Further, QFD allows customers to prioritize their requirements and benchmark us against our competitors, and then directs us to optimize those aspects of our product, process, and organization that will bring the greatest competitive advantage.
Most projects cannot afford to apply limited financial, time, and human resources to low-priority issues. With budgets, time, and personnel always limited, QFD helps the organization get its biggest bang for the buck by enabling a data-driven approach to allocating constrained resources. Priorities can be derived using psychologically friendly judgments that can be transformed, based on sound mathematical principles, into proportioned weights that can be used to calculate money, man hours, and staff.
The underlying principles are as follows:
* Voice of the customer analysis helps identify critical stakeholders and their most important needs.
* Cause and effect help clarify the complex relationships between different levels of design.