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The House of Quality

by John R. Hauser and Don ClausingDesign is a team effort, but how do marketing and engineering talk to each other?   

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Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, and ITT are getting started with it. Ford and General Motors use it—at Ford alone there are more than 50 applications. The “house of quality,” the basic design tool of the management approach known as quality function deployment (QFD), originated in 1972 at Mitsubishi’s Kobe shipyard site. Toyota and its suppliers then developed it in numerous ways. The house of quality has been used successfully by Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics, home appliances, clothing, integrated circuits, synthetic rubber, construction equipment, and agricultural engines. Japanese designers use it for services like swimming schools and retail outlets and even for planning apartment layouts.

A set of planning and communication routines, quality function deployment focuses and coordinates skills within an organization, first to design, then to manufacture and market goods that customers want to purchase and will continue to purchase. The foundation of the house of quality is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers’ desires and tastes—so marketing people, design engineers, and manufacturing staff must work closely together from the time a product is first conceived.

The house of quality is a kind of conceptual map that provides the means for interfunctional planning and communications. People with different problems and responsibilities can thrash out design priorities while referring to patterns of evidence on the house’s grid.

What’s So Hard About Design

David Garvin points out that there are many dimensions to what a consumer means by quality and that it is a major challenge to design products that satisfy all of these at once.1 Strategic quality management means more than avoiding repairs for consumers. It means that companies learn from customer experience and reconcile what they want with what engineers can reasonably build.

Before the industrial revolution, producers were close to their customers. Marketing, engineering, and manufacturing were integrated—in the same individual. If a knight wanted armor, he talked directly to the armorer, who translated the knight’s desires into a product. The two might discuss the material—plate rather than chain armor—and details like fluted surfaces for greater bending strength. Then the armorer would design the production process. For strength—who knows why?—he cooled the steel plates in the urine of a black goat. As for a production plan, he arose with the cock’s crow to light the forge fire so that it would be hot enough by midday.

Today’s fiefdoms are mainly inside corporations. Marketing people have their domain, engineers theirs. Customer surveys will find their way onto designers’ desks, and R&D plans reach manufacturing engineers. But usually, managerial functions remain disconnected, producing a costly and demoralizing environment in which product quality and the quality of the production process itself suffer.

Top executives are learning that the use of interfunctional teams benefits design. But if top management could get marketing, designing, and manufacturing executives to sit down together, what should these people talk about? How could they get their meeting off the ground? This is where the house of quality comes in.

Consider the location of an emergency brake lever in one American sporty car. Placing it on the left between the seat and the door solved an engineering problem. But it also guaranteed that women in skirts could not get in and out gracefully. Even if the system were to last a lifetime, would it satisfy customers?

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Quality function deployment

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Quality function deployment (QFD) is a “method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process.” [1], as described by Dr. Yoji Akao, who originally developed QFD in Japan in 1966, when the author combined his work in quality assurance and quality control points with function deployment used in Value Engineering.

QFD is designed to help planners focus on characteristics of a new or existing product or service from the viewpoints of market segments, company, or technology-development needs. The technique yields graphs and matrices.

QFD helps transform customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering characteristics (and appropriate test methods) for a product or service, prioritizing each product or service characteristic while simultaneously setting development targets for product or service.

Contents

[hide] 1 Areas of application

2 History 3 Techniques and tools based on QFD

o 3.1 House of Quality o 3.2 Pugh concept selection o 3.3 Modular Function Deployment

4 Relationship to other techniques

5 Notes and references

[edit] Areas of application

QFD House of Quality for Enterprise Product Development Processes

QFD is applied in a wide variety of services, consumer products, military needs (such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter [2] ), and emerging technology products. The technique is also used to identify and document competitive marketing strategies and tactics (see example QFD House of Quality for Enterprise Product Development, at right). QFD is considered a key practice of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS - as seen in the referenced roadmap).[3] It is also implicated in the new ISO 9000:2000 standard which focuses on customer satisfaction.

Results of QFD have been applied in Japan and elsewhere into deploying the high-impact controllable factors in Strategic planning and Strategic management (also known as Hoshin Kanri, Hoshin Planning,[4] or Policy Deployment).

Acquiring market needs by listening to the Voice of Customer (VOC), sorting the needs, and numerically prioritizing them (using techniques such as the Analytic Hierarchy

Process) are the early tasks in QFD. Traditionally, going to the Gemba (the "real place" where value is created for the customer) is where these customer needs are evidenced and compiled.

While many books and articles on "how to do QFD" are available, there is a relative paucity of example matrices available. QFD matrices become highly proprietary due to the high density of product or service information found therein.

Notable U.S. companies using QFD techniques include the U.S. automobile manufacturers General Motors, Ford, Chrysler LLC, and their suppliers, as well as IBM, Raytheon, General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Eaton Corporation and many others.[citation needed]

[edit] History

While originally developed for manufacturing industries, interest in the use of QFD-based ideas in software development commenced with work by R. J. Thackeray and G. Van Treeck,[5] for example in Object-oriented programming [6] and use case driven software development.[7]

Since its early use in the United States, QFD met with initial enthusiasm then plummeting popularity when it was discovered that much time could be wasted if poor group decision making techniques were employed.[citation needed] Organizational/corporate culture has an effect on the ability to change organizational human processes and on the sustainability of the changes. In particular, in organizations exhibiting strong cultural norms and rich sets of tacit assumptions that prevent objective discussion of historical courses of action, QFD may be resisted due to its ability to expose tacit assumptions and unspoken rules.[citation needed] It has been suggested that a learning organization can more easily overcome these issues due to the more transparent nature of the organizational culture and to the readiness of the membership to discuss relevant cultural norms.[citation

needed]

[edit] Techniques and tools based on QFD

[edit] House of Quality

House of Quality appeared in 1972 in the design of an oil tanker by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.[8][citation needed] Akao has reiterated numerous times that a House of Quality is not QFD, it is just an example of one tool.[9]

A Flash tutorial exists showing the build process of the traditional QFD "House of Quality" (HOQ).[10] (Although this example may violate QFD principles, the basic sequence of HOQ building are illustrative.) There are also free QFD templates available that walk users through the process of creating a House of Quality.[11]

Other tools extend the analysis beyond quality to cost, technology, reliability, function, parts, technology, manufacturing, and service deployments.

In addition, the same technique can extend the method into the constituent product subsystems, configuration items, assemblies, and parts. From these detail level components, fabrication and assembly process QFD charts can be developed to support statistical process control techniques.

[edit] Pugh concept selection

Pugh Concept Selection can be used in coordination with QFD to select a promising product or service configuration from among listed alternatives.

[edit] Modular Function Deployment

Modular Function Deployment uses QFD to establish customer requirements and to identify important design requirements with a special emphasis on modularity.

[edit] Relationship to other techniques

The QFD-associated "Hoshin Kanri" process somewhat resembles Management by objectives (MBO), but adds a significant element in the goal setting process, called "catchball". Use of these Hoshin techniques by U.S. companies such as Hewlett Packard have been successful in focusing and aligning company resources to follow stated strategic goals throughout an organizational hierarchy.

Since the early introduction of QFD, the technique has been developed to shorten the time span and reduce the required group efforts (such as Richard Zultner's Blitz QFD)

Link 3

Quality function deployment (QFD) was originally developed by Yoji Akao in 1966 when the author combined his work in quality assurance and quality control points with function deployment used in Value Engineering. Mr. Akao described QFD as a “method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process. ” [1]

QFD is designed to help planners focus on characteristics of a new or existing product or service from the viewpoints of market segments, company, or technology-development needs. A market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs The technique yields graphs and matrices. In Mathematics, a matrix (plural matrices) is a rectangular table of elements (or entries) which may be Numbers or more generally

QFD has been used by several corporations and organizations.

Contents

1 The technique 2 Areas of application 3 History 4 Techniques and tools based on QFD

o 4.1 House of Quality o 4.2 Pugh concept selection

5 Relationship to other techniques

6 Notes and references

The technique

1. Identify customer needs and wants as voice of the customer (VOC)2. Identify the engineering characteristics of products or services that meets VOC3. Setting development targets and test methods for the products or services

QFD helps transform customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering characteristics (and appropriate test methods) for a product or service, prioritizing each product or service characteristic while simultaneously setting development targets for product or service. A customer is someone who makes use of the paid products of an individual or Organization. A human need can be defined either psychologically or objectively Voice of the customer (VOC is a term used in business to describe the process of capturing a customer's requirements Engineering is the Discipline and Profession of applying technical and scientific Knowledge and A test method is a definitive procedure that produces a test result

Areas of application

QFD House of Quality for Enterprise Product Development Processes

QFD is applied in a wide variety of services, consumer products, military needs (such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter [2] ), and emerging technology products. WikipediaWikiProject Aircraft. Please see WikipediaWikiProject Aircraft/page content for recommended layout Technology is a broad concept that deals with a Species ' usage and knowledge of Tools and Crafts and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt The technique is also used to identify and document competitive marketing strategies and tactics (see example QFD House of Quality for Enterprise Product Development, at right). House of Quality is a graphic tool for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities QFD is considered a key practice of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS - as seen in the referenced roadmap). [3] It is also implicated in the new ISO 9000:2000 standard which focuses on customer satisfaction. ISO 9000 is a family of standards for Quality management systems ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO the International Organization for Standardization and is

Results of QFD have been applied in Japan and elsewhere into deploying the high-impact controllable factors in Strategic planning and Strategic management (also known as Hoshin Kanri, Hoshin Planning,[4] or Policy Deployment). Strategic planning is an Organization 's process of defining its Strategy, or direction and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy Strategic management is the art science and craft of formulating implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its objectives &quotHoshin kanri is a method devised to capture and cement strategic goals as well as flashes of insight about the future and develop the means to bring these into reality

Acquiring market needs by listening to the Voice of Customer (VOC), sorting the needs, and numerically prioritizing them (using techniques such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process) are the early tasks in QFD. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP is a structured

technique for helping people deal with complex decisions. Traditionally, going to the Gemba (the "real place" where value is created for the customer) is where these customer needs are evidenced and compiled. Gemba is a Japanese term meaning &quotthe place where the truth can be found

While many books and articles on "how to do QFD" are available, there is a relative paucity of example matrices available. QFD matrices become highly proprietary due to the high density of product or service information found therein.

Notable U. S. companies using QFD techniques include the U. S. automobile manufacturers (GM, Ford, Daimler Chrysler) and their suppliers, IBM, Raytheon,General Electric,Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and many others. General Motors Corporation ( GM) ( is a multinational automobile manufacturer founded in 1908 and headquartered in the United States. Ford Motor Company is an American Multinational corporation and the world's fourth largest automaker based on Worldwide vehicle sales, following Daimler AG ( (formerly DaimlerChrysler AG) is a German car corporation (not to be confused with the British car-maker Daimler Motor Company) and International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed &quotBig Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Raytheon Company ( is a major American Defense contractor and industrial corporation with core Manufacturing concentrations in Defense systems The Boeing Company is a major Aerospace and defense corporation originally founded by William E

History

While originally developed for manufacturing industries, interest in the use of QFD-based ideas in software development commenced with work by R. J. Thackeray and G. Raymond John Thackeray known as Ray Thackeray was one of the founders of OnVantage Inc Van Treeck,[5] for example in Object-oriented programming [6] and use case driven software development. Object-oriented programming (OOP is a Programming paradigm that uses " objects " and their interactions to design applications and computer programs A use case is a description of a system’s behaviour as it responds to a request that originates from outside of that system [7]

Since its early use in the United States, QFD met with initial enthusiasm then plummeting popularity when it was discovered that much time could be wasted if poor group decision making techniques were employed. Organizational culture/corporate culture has an effect on the ability to change organizational human processes and on the sustainability of the changes. In particular, in organizations exhibiting strong cultural norms and rich sets of tacit assumptions that prevent objective discussion of historical courses of action, QFD may be resisted due to its ability to expose tacit assumptions and unspoken rules. A tacit assumption or implicit assumption is an assumption that includes the underlying agreements or statements made in the development of a Logical argument, Unspoken rules are behavioral constraints imposed in organizations or societies that are not voiced or written down It has been suggested that a learning organization can more easily overcome these issues due to the more transparent nature of the organizational

culture and to the readiness of the membership to discuss relevant cultural norms. Peter Senge and the Learning Organization In his book The Fifth Discipline The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge defines Social norms have been defined as &quotthe rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values beliefs attitudes and behaviors

Techniques and tools based on QFD

House of Quality

House of Quality appeared in 1972 in the design of an oil tanker by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Akao has reiterated numerous times that a House of Quality is not QFD, it is just an example of one tool. [8]

A Flash tutorial exists showing the build process of the traditional QFD "House of Quality" (HOQ). [9] (Although this example may violate QFD principles, the basic sequence of HOQ building are illustrative. ) There are also free QFD templates available that walk users through the process of creating a House of Quality. [10]

Other tools extend the analysis beyond quality to cost, technology, reliability, function, parts, technology, manufacturing, and service deployments.

In addition, the same technique can extend the method into the constituent product subsystems, configuration items, assemblies, and parts. System (from Latin systēma, in turn from Greek systēma is a set of interacting or interdependent Entities, real or abstract Configuration items or CI s form the basis of Configuration management solutions From these detail level components, fabrication and assembly process QFD charts can be developed to support statistical process control techniques. Statistical Process Control (SPC is an effective method of monitoring a process through the use of Control charts Control charts enable the use of objective criteria for distinguishing

Pugh concept selection

Pugh Concept Selection can be used in coordination with QFD to select a promising product or service configuration from among listed alternatives. The decision-matrix method, also Pugh method, is a quantitative technique used to rank the multi-dimensional options of an option set

Relationship to other techniques

This technique somewhat resembles Management by objectives (MBO), but adds a significant element in the goal setting process, called "catchball". Management by Objectives (MBO is a process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that Management and Employees agree to the objectives Use of these Hoshin techniques by U. S. companies such as Hewlett Packard have been successful in focusing and aligning

company resources to follow stated strategic goals throughout an organizational hierarchy.

Link 6This chapter provides an orientation to Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Six Sigma. It begins with a brief overview of each of these topics. It then provides a chronology of events that led to the current state of QFD and its integration with Six Sigma in the United States. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the ways QFD is being used, independently and together with Six Sigma methodologies today, to provide a sense of the applicability and flexibility of the methods.

1.3 History of QFD and Six Sigma

1.3.1 Origins of QFD

The people identified in this chronology have made special efforts in the best interests of U.S. industry. They could have kept QFD and Six Sigma as proprietary secrets, not to be shared with the competition. Instead, they shared their experiences with others, including their competitors, and everyone has gained.

QFD became widely known in the United States through the efforts of Don Clausing, of Xerox and later MIT, and Bob King of GOAL/QPC. These two worked independently, and likely first came into contact in October 1985, when Clausing presented QFD at a GOAL/QPC conference in Massachusetts. By that time, both men had already made significant contributions toward promoting QFD.

The Japanese characters for QFD are:

(hinshitsu), meaning "quality,""features,""attributes," or "qualities"14 (kino), meaning "function" or "mechanization"15

(tenkai), meaning "deployment,""diffusion,""development," or "evolution"

Any of the English words could have been chosen by early translators of Japanese articles. It's little more than a matter of chance that QFD is not called Feature Mechanization Diffusion today. In the early days, when Lou Cohen explained QFD to audiences, he attempted to rename it Structured Planning, or Quality Feature Deployment, in the hope that people would be able to tell from its name what QFD was all about. For better or for worse, "Quality Function Deployment" has stuck in the United States, and no alternative name is likely to survive. None of the thirty-two possible combinations of English equivalents really denotes what QFD actually is. We must be content with a name for the process which is not that self-explanatory.

1.3.2 Early History of QFD in Japan

Yoji Akao16 cites the rapid growth of the Japanese automobile industry in the 1960s as a driving force behind the development of QFD. With all the new product-development drives in the Japanese auto industry, people there recognized the need for design quality and that existing QC process charts confirmed quality only after manufacturing had begun. Mr. Akao's work with Kiyotaka Oshiumi of Bridgestone led to "Hinshitsu Tenkai" or "Quality Deployment," which was taken to various companies with little public attention. The approach was later modified in 1972 at the Kobe Shipyards of Mitsubishi Heavy Industry to systematically relate customer needs to functions and the quality or substitute quality characteristics. The first book on the topic, Quality Function Deployment by Akao and Mizuno, was published by JUSE Press in 1978.17

1.3.3 History of QFD in the USA

In 1983, the first article on QFD by Akao appeared in Quality Progress by ASQC,18 and from there things spread quickly. Don Clausing first learned about QFD in March 1984, during a two-week trip to Fuji-Xerox Corporation, a Xerox partner in Japan. Clausing, a Xerox employee at that time, had already become interested in the Robust Design methods of Dr. Genichi Taguchi, who was a consultant to Fuji-Xerox. While in Japan, Clausing met another consultant to Fuji-Xerox, a Dr. Makabe of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

At an evening meeting, Dr. Makabe briefly showed Clausing a number of his papers on product reliability. "After fifteen minutes," relates Clausing, "Dr. Makabe brushed the papers aside and said, 'Now let me show you something really important!' Makabe then explained QFD to me. I saw it as a fundamental tool that could provide cohesion and communication across functions during product development, and I became very excited about it."

In the summer of that same year, Larry Sullivan of Ford Motor Company organized an internal company seminar. Clausing was invited to present QFD. Sullivan quickly grasped the importance of the QFD concept and began promoting it at Ford.

Clausing continued to promote QFD, Taguchi's methods, and Stuart Pugh's concept-selection process at conferences and seminars. When Clausing joined the faculty at MIT, he developed a semester-length graduate course that unified these methods along with other concepts into a system for product development that eventually became called "Total Quality Development." Many of his students, already senior managers and engineers at large U.S. companies, returned to their jobs and spread his concepts to their coworkers.

In June 1987, Bernie Avishai, associate editor of Harvard Business Review, asked Don Clausing to write an article on QFD. Clausing felt that the paper should be given a marketing perspective, and he invited John Hauser to coauthor it. Hauser had become intrigued with QFD after learning about it from a visit to Ford. The article, published in the May–June 1988 issue of the Harvard Business Review, has become one of the

publication's most frequently requested reprints. That article probably increased QFD's popularity in the United States more than any other single publication or event.

Larry Sullivan founded the Ford Supplier Institute. This was a Ford Motor Company organization aimed at helping Ford's suppliers improve the quality of the components they developed for Ford. Sullivan and others at Ford gained a detailed understanding of QFD by working with Dr. Shigeru Mizuno and Mr. Akashi Fukahara from Japan. Eventually Ford came to require its suppliers to use QFD as part of their development process, and the Ford Supplier Institute provided training in QFD (along with other topics) to these suppliers.

The Ford Supplier Institute eventually became an independent nonprofit organization, the American Supplier Institute (ASI). ASI has become a major training and consulting organization for QFD. It has trained thousands of people in the subject.

Bob King, founder and executive director of GOAL/QPC, first learned of QFD from Henry Klein of Black and Decker. Klein had attended a presentation on QFD given by Yoji Akao and others in Chicago in November 1983. The following month, Klein attended a GOAL/QPC course on another TQM topic, where he told King about this presentation and about QFD. King began offering courses on QFD starting in March 1984. In the summer of that year, King learned more details about QFD from a copy of a 1978 book by Akao and Mizuno, Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment. In the fall of 1984, King began offering a three-day course on QFD, based on the understanding of the tool he had gained from the Akao and Mizuno book. In November 1985, King traveled to Japan and met with Akao to "ask him all the questions he couldn't answer." Akao provided King with his course notes on QFD, and he gave GOAL/QPC permission to translate the notes and use them in his GOAL/QPC courses.

Based on these notes, GOAL/QPC offered its first five-day course on QFD in February 1986. Lou Cohen attended that course and learned about QFD there for the first time.

At the invitation of Bob King, Akao came to Massachusetts and conducted a workshop on QFD in Japanese with simultaneous translation into English. Akao conducted a second workshop in June 1986, also under the auspices of GOAL/QPC. For this second workshop, GOAL/QPC translated a series of papers on QFD, including several case studies. This translation was later published in book form.19 Eventually this collection of QFD papers became what remains the standard advanced book on QFD.

In 1987, GOAL/QPC published the first full-length book on QFD in the United States: Better Designs in Half the Time, by Bob King.20 In this book, King described QFD as a "matrix of matrices" (see Chapter 18). King relates that in June 1990, Cha Nakui, a student of Akao's and later an employee in Akao's consulting company, "comes to work for GOAL/QPC and corrects flow of QFD charts." Among Nakui's contributions to our understanding of QFD is his explanation of the Voice of the Customer Table (see Chapter 5).

I first saw QFD while at AlliedSignal, now Honeywell, circa 1990. Early examples at that time included Toyota Motors' QFD processes. At the same time, Value Engineering was being taught at AlliedSignal, along with Robust Design methods from the American Supplier Institute. John Fox's seminal work, Quality Through Design: Key to Successful Product Delivery, was published in 1993, and included aspects of Design Process Flow, QFD, Design for Manufacture, and Critical Parameter Management, among many other methods. This work is one of the earliest to set the stage for Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and QFD.

Other important early publications in the United States include

"Quality Function Deployment and CWQC in Japan," by Professors Masao Kogure and Yoji Akao, Tamagawa University, published in Quality Progress magazine, October 1983

"Quality Function Deployment," by Larry Sullivan, published in Quality Progress magazine, June 1986

Articles on QFD by Bob King and Lou Cohen in the spring and summer 1988 editions of the National Productivity Review

A series of articles on QFD in the June 1988 issue of Quality Progress magazine A course manual on QFD to supplement ASI's three-day QFD course Annual Proceedings of QFD symposia held in Novi, Michigan, starting in 1989

QFD software packages first became available in the United States around 1989. The most widely known package was developed by International TechneGroup Incorporated. Some organizations heavily committed to QFD, such as Ford Motor Company, have developed their own QFD software packages.

Early adapters of QFD in the United States included Ford Motor Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, Procter and Gamble, and 3M Corporation. Many other companies have used QFD, and the tool continues to grow in popularity. More than fifty papers were presented at the Sixth Symposium on Quality Function Deployment in 1994. Only a few of these papers were not case studies. The majority of companies using QFD are reluctant to present their case studies publicly, since they don't want to reveal their strategic product planning. Therefore, it is likely that the fifty papers presented at the QFD Symposium represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of QFD implementation.

Figure 1-13 identifies many key events in the development of QFD, both in Japan and the United States. In some cases, where exact dates are not known, approximate months or years have been provided.

Figure 1-13. History of QFD in the United States21

Date Source Event

1966 Facilitating and Training in Quality

Japanese industry begins to formalize QFD concepts developed by Yoji Akao

Date Source Event

Function Deployment, Marsh, Moran, Nakui, Hoffherr

1966 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Bridgestone's Kurume factory introduces the listing of processing assurance items: "Quality Characteristics"

1969 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Katsuyoshi Ishihara introduces QFD at Matsushita

1972 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Yoji Akao introduces QFD quality tables at Kobe Shipyards

1978 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Dr. Shigeru Mizuno and Dr. Yoji Akao publish Deployment of the Quality Function (Japanese book on QFD)

1980 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Kayaba wins Deming prize with special recognition for using Furukawa's QFD approach for bottleneck engineering

1983 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Cambridge Corporation of Tokyo, under Masaaki Imai, introduces QFD in Chicago along with Akao, Furukawa, and Kogure

10/83 Quality Progress magazine

"Quality Function Deployment and CWQC in Japan," by Professors Masao Kogure and Yoji Akao, Tamagawa University

11/83 Bob King Akao and others introduce QFD at a U.S. workshop in Chicago, Illinois

3/84 Don Clausing Professor Makabe of Tokyo Institute of Technology explains QFD to Don Clausing

3/84 Bob King Bob King begins offering a one-day course on QFD

7/17/84 Don Clausing Don Clausing presents QFD to a Ford internal seminar organized by Larry Sullivan

Date Source Event

1985 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

Larry Sullivan and John McHugh set up a QFD project involving Ford Body and Assembly and its suppliers

10/30/85 Don Clausing Don Clausing presents QFD at GOAL/QPC's annual conference

11/85 Bob King King meets with Akao in Japan. Akao gives GOAL/QPC permission to translate his classroom notes and use them in GOAL/QPC's training

1/27/86 Don Clausing Don Clausing presents QFD to Ford's Quality Strategy Committee #2, chaired by Bill Scollard of Ford

2/86 Facilitating and Training in Quality Function Deployment

GOAL/QPC introduces Akao's materials in its five-day QFD course (the author attended this course in February 1986)

6/86 Don Clausing Larry Sullivan sponsors Dr. Mizuno who gives a three-day seminar on QFD

6/86 Quality Progress magazine

"Quality Function Deployment" by Larry Sullivan

10/86 Don Clausing Larry Sullivan launches QFD at Ford

6/87 Don Clausing Bernie Avishai, associate editor of Harvard Business Review, asks Don Clausing to write an article on QFD. Don invites John Hauser to co-author it. It is published in May–June 1988

1989 - present

ASI, GOAL/QPC Sponsorship of QFD Symposia at Novi, Michigan

2/6/91 Don Clausing Don Clausing and Stuart Pugh present "Enhanced Quality Function Deployment" at the Design and Productivity International Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii

1993 John Fox Publication of Quality Through Design, a book linking QFD to the pre- and post-design aspects around QFD, including Kano's Model, Design for Manufacture,

Date Source Event

Value Engineering, Reliability Growth, Critical Parameter Management, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, Taguchi Methods, and Statistical Process Control

1995 Steve Zinkgraf Steve Zinkgraf utilizes a QFD matrix in setting up the Cause & Effect Prioritization Matrix later used by many in the Six Sigma community when comparing multiple process inputs to multiple process outputs

1.3.4 History of QFD with Six Sigma

Dr. Stephen Zinkgraf22 observes that at Motorola in the late 1980s, QFD's use was frequently at the front end of designing new products. The focus was initially on two-way matrices, until Fernando Reyes used QFD in a very innovative fashion—to develop the strategic plan for manufacturing automotive electronic applications based on customer requirements.

In 1995, Zinkgraf was leading Six Sigma Deployment at the AlliedSignal Engineered Materials Sector, and was putting together the Six Sigma operations roadmap. He concluded that Six Sigma should be based on understanding the interaction between process inputs (Xs) and process outputs (Ys). Since the Ys were to reflect satisfying customer needs, it seemed that a two-way matrix mapping the process inputs generated by the process map focused on inputs and outputs to process requirements. It fit perfectly into the final roadmap. The process map generated the inputs to the Cause & Effect matrix. The C&E Matrix focused the FMEA on only the important inputs, thereby shortening and focusing the FMEA process. The roadmap—including the process map, the C&E Matrix, and the FMEA—opened the door to the Analysis phase of MAIC. The C&E Matrix, when done properly, yielded a process focus that really hadn't existed before, outside of the archaic fishbone diagram. The C&E Matrix is essentially the result of quantitative generation of multiple fishbone diagrams quickly. The limitation of the fishbone diagram had been that it was not focused on process inputs and allowed analysis of only one output at a time. With multiple outputs, it was not possible to aggregate the results into a single plan of action.

In 1998, I gave a talk entitled "QFD with a Six Sigma Twist" at an Annual Black Belt conference. In this talk, I commented that the QFD applications I had seen previously needed more of a VOC emphasis on the front end with FMEA, as well as some sampling strategies to better detail what they really needed. I also commented that more-detailed data and analysis on the linkages between matrices could be obtained with process maps and other Six Sigma tools, to enable users to truly understand the Y = f(x) relationships implied when connecting Hows to Whats. Additionally, I commented on the "How wells"—that true process capabilities needed to be determined in scoring what was

possible. I received positive feedback on turning what was then some large variation of QFD application into a flow map that could be followed. That flow map is illustrated in Figure 1-14.