FOCUdQuality Management

Listening to the Voice of the Customer: Using the Quality Function Deployment System

Robert King

In many of the cases reported, the use of quality deploy- ment has cut in half the problems at the beginning (de- sign) stages, shortened development time from one-half to one-third, all the while assuring users’ satisfaction and increasing sales. . . . However if it is applied in- correctly, it could increase work without producing any good.‘

So says Dr. Yoji Akao, professor of industrial engi- neering at Tamagawa University in Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Aka0 serves as the chairman of the Quality Function De- ployment Research Committee of the Japan Society for Quality Control. He is widely recognized as the leading teacher and expert on QFD both in Japan and in the United States.

In the U.S., QFD is being pioneered by the auto- makers-Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler and several of their suppliers, large and small. It is also being pio- neered by a wide variety of other companies, including Digital Equipment Company, AT&T Bell Labs, Procter & Gamble, and Omark Industries in its tree harvesting divi- sions. It is too early to determine its full potential, and at any rate, many companies are refusing to speak publicly about their progress because most of the breakthroughs de- veloped with QFD are considered “company confidential” and cannot be shared.

This article will give the reader a brief introduction to QFD. It will begin by tracing QFD’s origins in Japan and then identify the basic elements of QFD and report the cur- rent status of QFD in the U.S. and Japan. It will conclude with some concrete examples of QFD applications in the U.S.

Origin of quality function deployment Quality function deployment is a system to allow all

employees in the organization to participate in the design of new products. It is the outgrowth of the Japanese system called companywide quality control, which involves all employees in the organization in the continuous improve- ment effort. Both of these systems represent a fundamental change in the way organizations are managed.

Around 1900, U.S. engineer Frederick Taylor came to the conclusion that not all supervisors were smart enough

to figure out the best way to do a job. He determined that if engineers designed the job and production supervisors saw that the job was done as designed, there would be a tre- mendous improvement in productivity. His approach was correct for his day, and industry prospered by using it.

During this century the educational level of supervi- sors and production workers has improved, but we haven’t changed the system. In fact, we have gone beyond Taylor and fortified the walls between departments.

It was in Japan that the Taylor system began to be changed. In 1950, W. Edwards Deming began to teach Jap- anese engineers statistical tools for continuous improve- ment. In 1955, with some advice from Joseph Juran, man- agers were added to the improvement effort. In 1960, supervisors were added and in 1962 production workers were included in the effort. By 1965, the Japanese were involving all employees in improving quality, yield, cost, procedures, and systems and were calling their approach companywide quality control.

By the late 1970s, several Japanese companies were achieving incredible levels of quality and productivity. After a new product was introduced to production, every- one went to work to achieve the highest possible quality, and defects were measured in parts per million. But the Japanese were continually plagued by start-up problems when new products or models were introduced.

It became clear that a better job of design was re- quired so that when a new product was introduced to pro- duction, it was right from the beginning. The Japanese began this improvement effort with the cause-and-effect diagram. They later shifted to the logic tree to examine the interrelationships of customer demands, product design, and process controls.

In 1972, the Kobe shipyard began using a matrix that put customer demands on the vertical axis and the methods by which they would be met on the horizontal axis. This was recognized almost immediately as a major breakthrough. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Japa- nese have developed more matrices to improve communi- cation between the design and manufacturing departments. They have added matrices to better consider the function of the product, potential failure modes, possible new technol- ogies, and cost reduction, as well as systematic analysis of engineering bottlenecks. Today there are over thirty popu-

National Productivity ReviewiSumrner 1987 211

lar matrices that help assure that a product and process are designed right the first time.

In the early 1960s, the recognition that all employ- ees could contribute to continuous improvement led to widespread education in problem identification and prob- lem-solving tools. So, too, the recognition in the early 1980s that all employees could contribute to the design ef- fort led to the widespread education of employees in plan- ning tools both general and specific. Both of these develop- ments led to organizational change that made it possible to handle the millions of suggestions generated and, later, to let employees try their own improvements and report the improved procedures when they were successful. These de- velopments in employee education have contributed greatly to the economic success of numerous, though not all, Japa- nese industries.

The key elements of QFD One of the key benefits of QFD is getting a better

understanding of what the customer wants. This is defined in a series of charts called the Quality Tables.

There are three basic classes of customer wants. The first class consists of what the customers tells you they want, and which you then give them. This class of custom- er wants often takes the form of specifications. A police chief may tell an auto company, “I want a car that will go from zero to 50 in 7 seconds. ” Sometimes this requirement may be misleading. What does the police chief mean? Does he want a car that accelerates quickly? Does he want a car that will catch most cars on the road‘? Assuming that the chief knows what he wants and is expressing it clearly, how will it be achieved? Is cost a factor? The QFD system places a heavy emphasis on understanding customer de- mands. Masaki Imai of the Cambridge Corporation in Tokyo describes this part of the process as a game of catch in which the customer and supplier continually throw infor- mation back and forth until there is common understand- ing.

Specifications are just one class of customer expec- tations. The second class is called “expected quality.” This class consists of what the customers do not tell you they want, but which they assume they will get. For exam- ple, people assume that a product will be safe.

Extensive interviews with customers may not elicit a number of things that they expect. One example is that a wood lead pencil must be yellow. Rarely will customers tell you that they want a yellow pencil. However, experi- ence has shown that yellow is really the only color of wood pencil that sells in quantity.

Expected quality demands are not “satisfiers.” That is, if people don’t get characteristics like safety, they

are unhappy; but if people get them, they don’t feel particu- larly pleased-they are just getting what they expected.

The third group of customer expectations is what Dr. Aka0 calls “exciting quality.” These consist of new ideas generated by the supplier. The customer did not ex- pect the quality characteristics in this category, but they are improvements and the customer likes them. An example is the new disposable plastic lead pencils. Some have retract- able lead, a clip for attachment to the pocket, spring loaded lead so they don’t break, and a new formulation of lead using polymers that makes the writing easier to erase. None of these advances were demanded by customers. They were developed by suppliers who looked at issues like length of time between sharpenings and at new advances in plastics and polymers and figured out how to make a pencil of far superior quality at about the same price as the traditional lead pencil.

There has been a lot of talk about the customer late- ly. This had led to a rash of customer surveys. They can be found on restaurant tables, in hotel rooms, and even in supermarkets. W. Edwards Deming has criticized this preoccupation with surveys, since it is clear that neither “expected” nor “exciting” quality characteristics are like- ly to be cited by the customer.

Quality Tables

The Quality Tables cover a wide variety of other issues as well.

QFD looks at the various customers. The automaker has to be concerned not only with the driver but with the dealer and the repair shop too. QFD also examines the rela- tive level of importance of each demanded quality. The wood pencil has to be yellow, but the advertising copy can be in a number of colors. In addition, it looks at competi- tors to assess how they are doing on each demanded quality and each quality characteristic. QFD also examines the function of the product and its parts to assure that it stands up to the voice of the customer.

From all of these issues, the Quality Tables provide a list of five or six key items that, if improved, will give the company a real advantage over its competition. Often, new levels of accomplishment are required to improve these areas. Bottleneck engineering is the name given to a whole set of matrices that report the investigation of critical de- sign breakthroughs.

Manufacturing deployment

Another set of matrices used in QFD focuses on the manufacturing preparation stage of product development. In U.S. companies today, the design people often tell man-

218 National Productivity ReviewiSummer 1987

ufacturing or the supplier what quality characteristics are important. All too often this list is incomplete, inaccurate, or unclear. These charts help assure that such deficiencies are avoided.

The Quality Assurance Table (not to be confused with Quality Tables) lists not only what characteristics are important, but also indicates why they are important. This provides not only motivation but also focus to the control effort. The Quality Control Planning Chart and the Quality Control Process Chart list all of the parts that are critical for safety or for product function and detail the steps of their fabrication and assembly. Each item that will be monitored in the production process and each item that will be in- spected are detailed. In addition, the when, where, how, and who of the inspection are identified. Most companies identify these critical issues only when requested by the customer or long after the beginning of the production pro- cess. What is unique about QFD is that these items are identified before the first product is manufactured.

Reliability, technology, and cost deployment Many tools exist to track reliability. When one con-

siders the number of ways in which a product can fail to perform satisfactorily or safely, i t becomes evident that not even the largest or most profitable corporation can possibly address all of them. Traditionally, a system call Failure Mode and Effect Analysis has been used to identify which of the possible failure modes are the most important to work on. This system varies from organization to organiza- tion, but most often it looks at issues like the severity of the failure, the damage to surrounding parts, and the probabili- ty of failure and of the product getting out the door without the failure being detected. QFD prioritizes the failures based on their correlation with customer demands, function of the product, and quality characteristics. What this does is give the voice of the customer much more weight in the selection of potential failures to be addressed.

There is an almost endless stream of new technolo- gy. The task of deciding which technology to explore is significant. QFD focuses this effort in several ways. As was explained above, the Quality Tables identify the opti- mal improvement areas. These are then compared to the new technologies to see where the two correlate. In addi- tion, the areas of needed breakthroughs identified by the Quality Tables suggest new technologies to be explored.

Several U.S. companies are also using British engi- neer Stuart Pugh’s techniques of new concept selection to enhance the technology area of QFD. Pugh examines a new technology concept to see if it meets the quality criteria for a product. Each new technology concept is rated by a team as to whether it will meet the quality criteria better or worse than the existing concept.

QFD also focuses on cost. Although cost deploy- ment is one of the newer aspects of QFD, it has some inter- esting potential. QFD uses a weighting system that calcu- lates the relative value of each demanded quality, function, design parameter, mechanism, and part. The actual costs of these are then identified, and those costs that are higher than their value are selected for cost reduction through value engineering or some other cost-reduction system.

The current cost-reduction systems used by most companies are highly capricious. In some cases, the deci- sion is made to reduce all costs by an arbitrary amount like 10 percent or 20 percent. In other cases items of high vol- ume, high usage, or high cost are selected for cost reduc- tion. The QFD cost deployment system offers the potential for a much more focused approach to cost reduction. One of the obstacles will be the need to update current cost- accounting systems to make this approach truly effective.

Current status of QFD in Japan In 1975 Toyota began implementing QFD in-house,

and by 1979 it was requiring its suppliers to use it as well. Although since 1980 several industries and companies have been using QFD, it is still limited primarily to the Tokyo area, where most of the best courses in QFD are offered. Because most companies are reluctant to reveal their most important breakthroughs or their means of achieving them, it is difficult to get good data on which companies are or are not using QFD.

In late 1986, Yoji Aka0 compiled a survey on the use of QFD in Japan that provides some important insights. One of the questions asked was, “What were the results of your QFD study?” The five most frequent answers and the number of respondents giving them were as follows:

1. Design quality became easier to determine (49). 2 . Quality problems were reduced early on (33). 3. Product planning quality became easier to deter-

4. An ability to compare and analyze competitor’s

5. Better communication existed between depart-

Participants in the survey were also asked to iden- tify problems that they encountered in using QFD. The five most frequently reported problems and the number of re- spondents reporting them were as follows:

1 . Quality charts got too big (39). 2. Demanded quality was too difficult to learn (35). 3. Some answers were too difficult to categorize as

4. Determining the degree of interrelationships be-

mine (33).

products was created (29).

ments (29).

demanded quality (31).

National Productivity ReviewiSummer 1987 219

tween customer demands and quality character- istics was too hard (25) .

5. Could not judge the appropriateness of some de- manded quality items (24).

Although most companies used a group or team of people to do the QFD charts, in several companies the work was done by one person. Most of the companies used the Quality Tables and manufacturing deployment, with a less- er number using reliability, cost, and technology deploy- ment.

lmplernentation of QFD in the United States QFD is now being pioneered in the United States by

small, medium-sized, and large companies. Undoubtedly, the heaviest interest in QFD is in the automotive industry, although interest is strong in the computer industry as well.

A small computiv

Cirtek is a small electronics firm in Flint, Michigan, that makes controls for Ford Climate Control as well as a wide variety of other products. In the fall of 1986, Ford Climate Control asked Cirtek to participate in a pilot QFD project. Dave Taylor, president of Cirtek, has been the leader and facilitator of the QFD effort, and he considers it a great success. He had used QFD as a way to improve communication with Ford Climate Control. Cirtek and Ford Climate Control have used the KJ chart, also known as the affinity diagram. To fill out this chart, a Ford product engi- neer and a Ford quality engineer meet at the Cirtek facility with design, manufacturing, quality, and administrative heads to discuss customer requirements for a new product. Requirements are brainstormed and written on cards. The cards are arranged into meaningful categories. The result is a sharing of customer demands that never would have been communicated between the two firms before. Also, cus- tomer demands are made quite clear in the supplier’s lan- guage right from the beginning. At first it took two days to do a KJ chart for a product. Now it is not ususual to do two products in one day.

Dave Taylor suggests that QFD brings many bene- fits. In the past, the understanding of what the customer wanted was much less clear. As a result, products were designed that were not quite right, and a great deal of effort was later spent to redesign them because the original de- signs were wrong. Another benefit is that this system makes it possible to prioritize design work. In the past, de- sign engineers tended to focus on the things on which they liked to work. QFD also provides an opportunity to get de- sign engineers to share insights with each other. This means that more experienced engineers share with newer engineers.

A medium-sized company

Sheller Globe is a sizable automotive supplier with 150 plants worldwide. It has been a leader in quality tech- nology and has won many awards for its use of statistical process control, Taguchi design of experiments, and other tools. Now it can claim one of the most successful early implementations of QFD.

Last fall Joseph Meyers, the statistical trainer at the Keokuk, Iowa, plant took a five-day course in QFD. He went back to the plant and identified products for which QFD could be of help in the design process. Then, he se- lected the key people for each product in the areas of de- sign, manufacturing, quality, and cost. The author conduct- ed a five-day in-house training session in March 1987. Participants were taught the theory and methodology of QFD, and in working sessions they applied it to three spe- cific products. In the following weeks they were able to make progress in developing charts in the areas of quality, manufacturing, reliability, technology, and cost. They identified areas where the design of experiments would help them achieve breakthroughs as well as several new concepts for significant product improvements that look quite promising.

A large company

Ford Motor Company has made a major commit- ment to QFD, both in-house and with its suppliers. One of the areas where it has made tremendous progress is in the Ford Light Truck Division.

One area of application in the division has involved increased tire wear. It became clear that the project in this area would require bringing together three design engineer- ing divisions, steering suspension, and tires. The project was a complex one involving 100 customer demands and 10.000 or more correlations between customer demands and quality characteristics. The project resulted in a better definition of the engineering terms as well as customer re- quirements. One matrix compared market quality require- ments with functional performance characteristics. Other matrices compared functional performance characteristics with machine design parameters and functional design pa- rameters. In this way, the project also made it possible to understand various categories of engineering requirements in a clearer format. It is still too early in the process to report significant product improvements, but a new under- standing of several critical parameters clearly has created the potential for some significant breakthroughs.

Conclusion Progress in QFD is just beginning in the United

States. However, the enthusiasm is keen in many indus-

280 National Productivity RcvirwiSummer 1987

tries. Initial projects within a company seem to be most successful when they focus on key interfaces. In the case of a process industry like Procter & Gamble, the key interface

turing engineers. In the case of large companies like Ford Motor Company, the key interface may be between various engineering design groups or between various Ford divi- sions and their parts suppliers.

QFD holds great promise for a better definition of

is the One between the process engineers and the

customer demands and a systematic method to meet them. Significant education and organizational change will be needed to implement it. This may be difficult for compa- nies that seek the quick fix. But the potential reward is tre- mendous.

Robert King is executive director of Growth Opportuni- t y Alliance of Greater Lawrence ( G . O . A . L . ) i n Lawrence, Massachusetts, G-.O.A,L. is a nonprofit

ment and industrial competitiveness through manage- ment education in quality and productivity. Mr. King spends much of his time lecturing and writing on quality function deployment.

Massachusetts corporation fostering economic develop-

NOTE

1. Qualiy Deploymerit: A Series of Articles Edited by Yoji Akno, April 1986-Mnrch I987 (published in English by Growth Oppor- tunity Alliance of Greater Lawrence, Lawrence, Mass., 1987), pp. 1-3.

National Productivity ReviewiSummer 1987 28 1