In today’s competitive market, creating customer-centric products is more important than ever. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology designed to help organizations achieve this by prioritizing the voice of the customer (VOC) throughout the product development process.
By using a structured approach, QFD ensures that customer needs and preferences are taken into account, resulting in products that are more likely to satisfy your target audience.
In this guide, we’ll explore the key components of QFD, including the house of quality and the VOC. We’ll also delve into the four phases of the QFD process and provide a practical example of how it can be applied in product development.
Read on to learn how QFD can help your organization create products that truly resonate with your customers.
Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology for gathering customer requirements and turning them into products or services. It emphasizes listening to the customers’ needs and wants before deciding what product features or services to create to meet those demands.
The QFD methodology is meant to supplement an organization’s current design process. It’s a method to help analyze relationships between customer desires, product design, and technical requirements. When done correctly, it reveals the best features to build to improve customer satisfaction.
The main benefit of QFD is that it ensures the customer is considered in both the design and development process, resulting in products that are more likely to satisfy your customers.
Before diving into the detailed process of quality function deployment, it is essential to understand its key components. These components form the foundation of the QFD methodology and help organizations effectively analyze and prioritize customer requirements.
In this section, we’ll discuss the house of quality, a core tool of QFD, and the voice of the customer (VOC), which lays the groundwork for gathering customer insights.
Many people confuse the house of quality to be the same thing as QFD, but it’s actually the core tool of the QFD methodology. It contains several “rooms,” which create a house-shaped matrix:
There is no universally accepted version of the house of quality; you’ll see many slight variations, and it also changes as you go further along the methodology phases.
However, there are a few core rooms that frequently appear. Here’s a brief overview of each room:
For example, a high relationship score is weighted at 9, and the customer-requested feature has a weighted importance of 3. Multiply 9 by 3, which equals 27, and that is the importance rating. Add this to any other relationship scores in the column, and you have the total importance rating.
The first step of building the house of quality — and, subsequently, the entire QFD methodology — is to develop the voice of the customer (VOC). The VOC summarizes customers’ needs, wants, preferences, and desires associated with a product or service.
To develop the VOC, you need to create a solid market research report. Ideally, you should use a significant sample size to get the most accurate results.
There are a few ways to gather customer feedback to build the VOC, including:
Once you find specific items customers are requesting, then you can ask the customers how important it is to them to have that item, or you can rank items in order of importance. These items are then listed on the left side of the house of quality matrix, along with a weighted score of importance.
It’s crucial to develop the VOC correctly. Inaccurate information can skew the results of your market research and lead to poor deployment of the QFD.
As mentioned earlier, you may find slight variations in the QFD methodology because there isn’t a universally accepted way to conduct the matrix. However, these four seem to comprise the closest thing there is to a standard model.
Many people tend to only focus on the first phase of the QFD method because this phase directly incorporates customer feedback and finds the relationship between this feedback and product specifications.
However, there are additional phases, and they have a waterfall effect on each other:
At the end of each phase, the control factors (listed on the top of each matrix) move to the left-hand side of a new matrix and a new set of control factors go on top. This helps identify additional opportunities or conflicts in areas such as design, product development, engineering, etc.
Let’s dive into the details of each phase.
Th product planning phase begins with gathering customer feedback to develop the VOC. You’ll also identify the control factors. In this phase, it’s usually technical requirements. There may also be a competitive analysis to find the strength and weaknesses of your competitors.
Next, identify the relationship between the VOC and technical specifications to pinpoint what features to build next to satisfy customer needs. Ideally, this will be an area where your competitors are weak.
Product planning can help with the following goals:
Technical requirements move to the left side of the house of quality matrix, and a new set of control factors are put on top. The control factors for product development are usually critical parts or product specs.
In the product development phase, the goal is to recognize the key parts or specs to build a feature. It also helps with:
Based on the product and component specifications found in the previous phase, this section identifies processes necessary to build features and deliver functionality. This is crucial information for production and quality teams.
Critical parts or product specs are on the left side of the house of quality matrix, and the control factors are steps to build the product specs. You should discover which process will have the best impact on creating the product specs.
This phase may be a good time for identifying verification and validation, including:
This stage tends to be more crucial for manufacturing than software development. It’s designed to help you identify the best way to check the quality of the processes identified in the previous phase.
The house of quality matrix is built by putting processes on the right side, and the top section contains control specs. Then, your team can determine which controls are the most useful and create quality targets.
For SaaS companies, this phase can be part of the implementation and continuous improvement. For example:
Here is a general example of how product teams can implement the QFD methodology:
Quality function deployment helps product development teams create customer-centric products. It takes every stage of the product development process and ensures the VOC is prioritized.
The house of quality matrix also promotes the discovery of features that complement each other. Along the way, it can help discover areas where your customer has an unmet need from you and your competitors.
Thanks to the structured method of the house of quality matrix, you can align the company’s potential with what the customer wants from your product suite.
While there are plenty of benefits to using QFD, there are a few drawbacks to consider:
Quality function deployment helps you keep the voice of the customer top of mind throughout the product development lifecycle. That way, customer needs and preferences are a driving force in creating a product suite that meets their expectations.
To put as fine a point on it as possible, quality function can help you validate whether you’re on the right path to satisfying your customers.
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