Quality Function Deployment

QFD is the powerful development technique that ensures customer requirements drive the product introduction process. By making extensive use of team-based techniques and simple matrices to capture and analyse information, QFD enables a common understanding of the key success factors for any new product or service to be captured by development teams. This concentration on the "Voice of the Customer" will assist companies to produce products that consistently exceed customer expectations, improve communications, minimise changes and reduce the development cycle.

Course Content

Introduction
- What is the QFD methodology ?
- The benefits

Customer Focus
- Develop customer requirements
- Prioritisation of customer requirements
- Customer competitive rating

Technical Focus
- Establish technical characteristics
- Direction of technical improvement
- Correlation matrix
- Customer / technical interaction
- Prioritisation of technical characteristics
- Establish preliminary technical targets
- Technical competitive rating

QFD Interpretation
- Analyse and diagnose matrix
- Finalise technical targets
- Identify technical characteristics for further study

Design Deployment
- Generation and selection of concepts

Further QFD Phases
- Design deployment
- Process planning
- Production control

Managing QFD
- Team selection and implementation
- Links with other techniques (FMEA, Design of Experiments, Value Analysis)

Course Review
- Lessons learnt/benefits/barriers to implementation