Question

Explain to someone that hasn’t taken Quality Management what the method House of Quality is about and how it is conducted.

Answer 1

The House of Quality, or Quality Function Deployment (QFD), is a useful tool that Six Sigma Black Belt practitioners use during the Define phase of the DMAIC cycle of Six Sigma projects. The topic are often briefly discussed in Green Belt training or sometimes on online free Six Sigma courses. However, the House of Quality is one among the more advanced LEAN techniques. Let’s check out a practical example of how the House of Quality technique are often implemented.

Each successful company tries to use all variety of data and information during the process of planning, development, manufacturing, selling and promotion on the market the new prospective product or service. The process of planning new product, the market research, the application of quality management methods, quality control, total quality management and other innovative methods, as well as compliance to the requirements of the international standards, such as ISO 9001, are very important actions, which in much determine the future success of currently created product. The planning of new product includes the steps of studying demand, the comparing of competing products, the learning of information about customer requirements and their satisfaction with similar products. The most popular method, which allows identifying, classifying and transforming the clients’ needs and desires into the products engineering characteristics, identifying and setting priorities for each product and service, and simultaneously determining the objectives of production development, is the Quality function deployment (QFD) method. Appeared in Japan in 1972, this method is now quite popular and widely used in manufacturing areas of many countries.

The Quality function deployment (QFD) method is based on the belief that to be successful the products need to be designed obligatory with taking into account the customers’ desires and customers' tastes, only in this case will be created the really best product, relevant and demanded, which the customers want to buy and buy with pleasure. The QFD is a flexible method of decision-making, which helps the companies to focus on the most important characteristics of a new or existing product or service. In result of applying the QFD methodology the matrix is constructed, named House of quality (HOQ) according to its shape, which contains the information about customer desires and requirements received with the help of marketing research, and corresponding engineering targets and requirements formed on their base and imposed for the manufactured product. Typically, the House of quality matrix includes six major components: customer requirements, technical requirements, the planning matrix, the interrelationship matrix, the technical correlation matrix, the technical priorities/benchmarks and targets section.

House of Quality solution extends the ConceptDraw DIAGRAM software with powerful drawing tools, numerous specific samples and examples, and set of vector design elements of House of Quality shapes and symbols, which will help you in application the Quality function deployment (QFD) methodology and in easy creation the House of Quality Matrices intended for satisfaction the consumers' desires and requirements, for representing them in a visual way and then transformation into the targets and technical requirements to be followed for development the best products.

House of Quality Steps

To build the house of quality, basic six steps are performed. House of Quality Steps are as follows:

• Identify what customer wants.
• Identify how the product will satisfy the customer. It refers to identifying specific product characteristics, features or attributes and showing how they're going to satisfy customer wants
• Identify relationships between how’s. A couple of questions, that are to be answered here: How do our how’s tie together? What is the relationship between our two or more how’s?
• Develop importance ratings. It refers to using the customer’s importance ratings and weights from the relationships within the matrix to compute our importance ratings.
• Evaluate competing products or services. The question to be answered here is: How well do competing products meet customer wants? This activity is completely based on research.
• Determine the desirable technical attributes. In this step, our performance and therefore the competitor’s performance are determined and compared.

The basic graphic diagram for any House of Quality seems like this.

Design Elements -- House of Quality Shapes

Design Elements-- House Of Quality Symbols

For Example: Building the House of Quality,

This under mentioned picture illustrates the building of House of quality matrix. The House of quality matrix is a widely used and the most recognized form of the Quality Function Deployment method. In its base lies the opinion that the products must be designed taking into account the customers' desires and tastes. This diagram includes figures along with characters which meanings are described in detail in the legend. There used symbols indicating very strong relationship, strong relationship and weak relationship. As for the process of building the House of Quality matrix - the best way is to use the ConceptDraw DIAGRAM software extended with new House of Quality solution, which makes this process the easiest and requiring no efforts and drawing abilities. All you need is offered by solution libraries – the objects for composing the House of Quality Matrix and common house of quality symbols.

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