House of Quality

If the pharmaceutical industry adopted the lessons learned in other branches (e.g., aircraft industry, automotive industry) it could realize an increased efficiency in the qualification and validation processes. To this end effort should be made to investigate statistical process control (SPC), house of quality, Deming circuits, and so on. 

Many people report that the house of quality (i.e., QFD) appears intimidating when they first see it. And, at first glance it does appear hopelessly crowded. It is actually easy to understand if you work through each of the building blocks individually. The house of quality (notice the roof in Figure 13.1) is built section by section. It is not possible to build all the sections at once. In fact, it is probably impossible to build sections simultaneously. 

Figure 13.1 House of Quality—Integrating Customer Requirements into Product Design...

Brief Overview. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a powerful and widely used method to define your customers, determine their needs, benchmark the competition, and define engineering parameters and targets that, when met, will lead to a successful product. The QFD diagram, referred to as the house of quality because of its shape (Fig. 31.1), provides an important view of the customers needs. Understanding your customers and the environment in which you must compete is cmcial to your problem definition. 

There are variations to the house of quality. - - - Some people try to quantify the relative importance of each requirement others are more qualitative. Figure 31.1 shows a house of quality with each room numbered. Figure 31.2 illustrates an example of the following hypothetical product A manufacturer of toaster ovens would like its next generation of products to satisfy universal design requirements. In this brief overview of QFD, select issues will be highlighted in each room. Follow both Figs. 31.1 and 31.2 in the house tour below. 

At the center of the QFD approach is the house of quality shown in Figure 6.3. The house encapsulates what is known about customer requirements, their importance, and the supply chain features needed to meet those requirements. 

This chapter describes how Acme can start with a QFD-compatible customer survey to set its direction. The results of the survey are then transferred to the house of quality shown in Figure 6.3, an example of which is provided in this chapter as Figure 11.1. 

Figure 11.1 shows how QFD displays the results of the survey. It integrates the inputs gathered from the questionnaires. Note that Figure 11.1 is a simplified version omitting the Correlation Matrix, the rooP of the house of quality, shown in Figure 6.3. The left column, the inputs to the matrix, come from the survey. In the figure, these include 14 performance attributes in their order of importance to customers and representing the voice of the customer.

Hauser, John R. and Clausing, Don, The house of quality. Harvard Business Review, (66/3) May-June 1988, 63-73-... 

House of quality matrix - customer requirements (vertical axis) are matched with design attributes (horizontal axis), and a coding scheme is used to indicate the degree and direction of influence. 

Translating the customers responses into useable items is usually accomplished by application of the house of quality. The house of quality is a matrix, or perhaps more accurately an augmented matrix. Two important attributes of the house of quality are (1) its capabihty for ranking the various inputs in terms of perceived importance and (2) the data in the completed house that shows much ofthe decision making that went into the translation of customers wants and need into useable task descriptions. The latter attribute... 

It is very likely that the ECs used in the house of quality will need to be translated into other requirements. A useful way to do this is to use the ECs from this first house as the inputs to a second house, whose output might be cost or parts to accompHsh the ECs. It is not unusual to have a sequence of several houses of quality, as shown in Fig. 23.19. 

The general format of the House of Quality is made up of six major components which are completed in the course of a QFD project The six major components are ... 

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