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Rick Norman
Leading Expert on QFD

QFD Process

QFD is more than drawing the Planning House of Quality

When most companies think of QFD, they picture drawing the Planning House of Quality (HoQ). Since there is a history of 3-day training seminars built around experiencing the Planning HoQ, many companies "do their QFD" by only drawing the Planning HoQ. Contrary to what the 3-day training seminars teach, QFD should not be thought of as drawing a Planning HoQ but should be thought of as adding significant cross-functional knowledge and wisdom to the planning process.

Cross-functional knowledge and wisdom is gained by . . . gathering and understanding the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and the Voice of the Business (VoB) . . . the development of cross-functional concepts and targets . . . the deployment of these targets to the design and delivery teams. Gaining cross-functional knowledge and wisdom is a significant effort that vastly increases the chances for a winning, profitable solution in the marketplace. Gaining cross-functional knowledge and wisdom can’t happen in a short 3-day effort.

Typically, cross-functional QFD is not done as part of the Planning HoQ drawing process. If the cross-function QFD is done, it is generally done in isolation by Marketing or Product Planning with very little true understanding of customers and their needs. Even more detrimental, the little that Marketing and Product Planning discover about the customer may not be transferred to the subsequent development and design teams. Since cross-function QFD will take time (weeks instead of days) it is often mistakenly interpreted as "QFD takes longer to do".

The most important aspect of the early QFD weeks (and the most time consuming) is the process of experiencing the customers’ use environments, documenting methodical observations, conducting detailed one-on-one interviews, and building a contextual customer NEEDS (VoC) database. The NEEDS database must contain actual customer feedback on IMPORTANCE and SATISFACTION that can provide the cross-functional teams with the insight they need for true customer understanding.

This early QFD work is often done, if done at all, by outside research firms with only minimal understanding of QFD. The richness of the customer NEEDS understanding, the first-hand experience of the use environments, and the shared knowledge gained through cross-functional discussions about these experiences, cannot be replaced by a research report. Home runs come from you building a strong and first-hand understanding of your customer NEEDS. Research firms are ok as long as you participate during the research firm’s contact with your customers.

If you do QFD as suggested here, there is a significant amount of data that needs to be shared, saved and organized into a series of inter-related HoQs. With this QFD approach, you will not have one Planning HoQ at the end of your QFD project but will have a cascade of HoQs that start with planning HoQs, which flow into evaluation HoQs, which flow into selection HoQs, which flow into deployment HoQs. QFDcapture distinguishes itself from the other QFD tools in that QFDcapture does not just conveniently draw a single HoQ but organizes, stores and presents the cross-functional data as the cascade of HoQs needed to fully plan a successful solution in the marketplace.

An example of cascaded HoQs Commonly used to develop products is the Four Phase Process. In the Four Phase Process, there are four cascaded HoQs . . . Product Planning HoQ . . . Part Planning HoQ . . . Process Planning HoQ . . . Process Control Planning HoQ (see figure below). With the Four Phase Process the cross-functional team plans the essential details of a product starting with what the customers say they want down to the process control values used to control the manufactures of the product.

A side benefit of the Four Phase Process is in the resolution of warranty issues. Customers make warranty complaints using the words in the ‘Customer Wants’ section of the planning HoQ (a warranty complaint is a Customer Need not being met or working improperly). Since the Four Phase Process cascades the relationships between Customer Wants and process control settings, it is easy to see which process control settings have the most impact on delivering the Customer Need that is expressed in the warranty complaint. Without a Four Phase QFD model, knowing which process control values to adjust to resolve warranty issues is a much more difficult process.