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Using Quality Function Deployment to Write an ISO

Standard for QFD*
a
Glenn H. Mazur
a
QFD Institute and International Council for QFD , Ann Arbor , Michigan , USA
Published online: 20 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Glenn H. Mazur (2012) Using Quality Function Deployment to Write an ISO Standard for QFD*, Quality
Engineering, 24:3, 436-443, DOI: 10.1080/08982112.2012.682510

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 Quality Engineering, 24:436–443, 2012
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0898-2112 print=1532-4222 online
DOI: 10.1080/08982112.2012.682510

Using Quality Function Deployment to

Write an ISO Standard for QFD

Glenn H. Mazur
QFD Institute and International ABSTRACT Quality function deployment (QFD) is methodology designed
Council for QFD, Ann Arbor, to improve customer satisfaction by increasing the quality of new products
Michigan, USA and services. Unlike traditional quality methods that focus on solving exist-
ing, known problems to achieve ‘‘zero defect,’’ QFD is driven by the voice of
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the customer to explore high-priority spoken and unspoken needs that must
be met for a new product or service to be accepted. To achieve this first-time
quality, developers must know what problems the customer has, how
important those problems are to helping the customer do their job better,
and what level of improvement is necessary for the customer to accept it
in place of their current practice. Thus, QFD is highly dependent on the cus-
tomer and their business, the industry of the product or service, and what
competitive alternatives the customer has access to. This article will discuss
how these same methods are used to write the QFD standard itself.

KEYWORDS ISO standards, quality function deployment (QFD), voice of the

customer (VOC)

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Editor’s Note: In this issue we have
invited Glenn Mazur, expert in qual- Quality function deployment (QFD) was developed in Japan during the
ity function deployment (QFD), to 1960s during its period of modernizing traditional approaches to quality man-
present his views and experience on
using QFD for standards develop- agement (Akao 1990; Mizuno and Akao 1994) to assure that not only was
ment, particularly on how this has negative quality (customer dissatisfaction) addressed in the design and devel-
been used in new development work
for applying QFD itself. This is parti-
opment of new products and services but that positive quality (customer sat-
cularly significant in standards devel- isfaction) become the hallmark of competitiveness. In other words, a lack of
opment in general because in dissatisfaction does not guarantee satisfaction; that is, nothing 6¼ anything
addition to technical substance, a
high-quality standards development right. The concept was extraordinary at the time. Traditional approaches to
process requires team identification, product design were typically driven by technical advancements that often
customer identification, customer
requirements, consensus building,
failed in usability or made downstream manufacturability or service delivery
balloting, and compromise. a nightmare. The QFD approach recommended the following:


Edited by Stephen N. Luko, Hamilton
Sundstrand Corporation, Windsor
Lock, Connecticut. . Assuring product quality required a multifunctional team approach.
Address correspondence to Glenn H. Quality engineers typically engage too late in the process to truly affect
Mazur, QFD Institute and customer satisfaction and value.
International Council for QFD, 1140
Morehead Ct., Ann Arbor, MI 48103, . For customer-focused design, it is critical to involve the users, buyers, and
USA. E-mail: Glenn@[Link] other stakeholders who can make or influence a purchase decision. QFD
436
 recommends that marketing play a leading role in the emerging needs of its practitioners. The resulting
acquiring and analyzing the voice of the customer Blitz QFD1 (QFD Institute, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) is
(VOC) to determine what matters most to these fast becoming a global best practice and will be
stakeholders. recommended along with classical QFD in the stan-
. Different stakeholders have different needs with dard under development.
different strengths. It is important to get an I, the executive director of the QFD Institute and
accurate priority from them before detailed the International Council for QFD (ICQFD), was
development and implementation begin. This will asked to convene Working Group 2 to write this stan-
improve quality, acceptance, and timing, and dard. It seemed both practical and demonstrative to
lower costs due to waste and rework. use QFD in writing the QFD standard. This was
because the standard would be a new product, would
Since then, QFD has been successfully applied to have customers=users with needs, and, if the standard
services such as financial, hospitality, health care, met their needs (satisfaction) and made their work
and education; manufacturing such as aerospace, easier, faster, and better, it would be widely accepted.
electronics, appliances, and transportation; software
such as communications, databases, and Web sites; THE STEPS
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and business processes such as strategic planning

and corporate governance. Step 1—Scope of the Project
In 2009, the Japan Standards Organization (JSA) A common concern of all process, service, and pro-
initiated a proposal to write a standard for QFD duct planners is scope ‘‘drift’’ and ‘‘creep.’’ Once a
under the auspices of the Technical Committee 69 project has been chartered with a budget, resources,
for Statistical Methods Subcommittee 8 (TC69=SC8) deliverables, and time schedule, any change in scope
for New Product Development. The initial idea was can be significant. Communications from the JSA
that QFD was able to ‘‘transform’’ VOC data into Secretariat for TC69=SC8 described my task as:
engineering parameters of a solution. Because VOC
involved statistical methods to prioritize and measure The convener has the Chair=Secretary role in a Working
Group. A Working Group is comprised of experts who will
customer value, and engineering parameters contribute to the development of new standards. Working
involved statistical methods to measure and control Group will have several projects led by a project leader
performance and functional quality to assure that who will be the main person to draft the new standards.
There is a timeframe for developing ISO [International
VOC was met, the process of transforming VOC into
Organization for Standardization] standard, and we are
engineering parameters would optimally use statisti- required to develop a standard in three years (typical for
cal methods as well. QFD fits that definition well. a new development), including a balloting period for the
In the years between 1966 and 2009, both industry national standards bodies around the world. (TC69 sec-
retariat, personal communication)
needs and QFD tools evolved significantly. Early QFD
efforts through the 1990s focused on creating elabor- An existing Japanese Standard for QFD, Q-9025, was
ate charts (called house of quality) to help the multi- recommended as a starting point for this development.
functional teams visualize the complex cause-and-
effect correlations among users, developers, builders, Step 1.1—Confirmation of Roles
and deliverers of products and services. Statistical
models were incorporated so that market priorities
and Responsibilities
could be maintained and tracked as they drove prio- To better understand this task, I was referred to
rities for engineering and manufacturing. By the late several U.S. members of TC69, referred to as the
1990s, companies began adopting lean practices to Technical Advisory Group 69 (TAG69). They were
reduce resources, time, and cost, and this spread to able to clarify the role of the convener as being both
QFD efforts as well. The elaborate ‘‘houses’’ required a project leader and working group chairman and
more time than most project teams could spare, so were authorized to recruit subject-matter experts.
QFD usage began to taper off. Dr. Yoji Akao, one Upon confirmation from JSA that these roles and
of the cofounders of QFD, then asked the QFD responsibilities were acceptable, I accepted the
Institute to modernize the method to better meet convenership of ISO=TC69=SC8=WG2 in June 2009.

437 Reviews of Standards and Related Materials

Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 04:44 12 November 2014

FIGURE 1 Draft writing timeline for QFD standard. (Color figure available online.)

Step 1.2—Define Process Steps 10. Propose QFD implementation guidelines for
successful and sustainable QFD applications.
for WG2 Activities
11. Propose criteria for measuring the success of a
The task of writing the standard was broken down QFD application.
into a series of tasks as follows: 12. Propose guidelines for continuous improvement
of QFD activities within the organization.
1. Define timeline for WG2. Ask SC8 to please 13. Recommend resources for obtaining QFD
provide this information to me as soon as knowledge and best practice.
possible. 14. Provide examples of QFD applications.
2. Develop WG team member selection criteria.
Based upon the purpose and scope, develop a
prioritized list of criteria from which to propose Step 1.3—Develop Timeline
and select membership in WG2. Creating, submitting, receiving commentary, revis-
3. Identify users (customers) of the proposed QFD ing, and publish a standard has its own scheduling
standard. requirements that must be managed like any other
4. Interview and=or survey users in order to under- project. To make sure the proper experts, draft
stand their problems and wishes. editors, and other resources are available when
5. Translate problems and wishes into user needs. needed, as well as interim meeting attendance and
6. Have users prioritize their needs. appropriate review periods, a timeline was created
7. Translate prioritized needs into prioritized and approved by the chairman of Subcommittee 8
technical characteristics of QFD, including (see the timeline Figure 1).
recommendations for methods, tools, and
approaches.
8. Develop standards and recommendations in
Step 2—Select Team Members
accordance with the priorities of the technical Discussions with several members of other U.S.
characteristics. TAG69 conveners revealed what makes a good
9. Identify potential failure modes for QFD and working group team member. Because not every
recommendations. potential team member would epitomize all

G. Mazur 438
 useful to convert all of the statements into expressions
of positive expectations for which each candidate mem-
ber could be evaluated objectively or subjectively.
These were structured into the hierarchy in Figure 2.
The hierarchy helps organize criteria by layers of
abstraction, which will improve the prioritization pro-
cess described below.

Step 2.2—Prioritizing WG Team

Membership Nomination Criteria
Prioritization in multicriteria decision making was
advanced by the research of Dr. Thomas Saaty in the
1970s at the U.S. Department of Defense and later at
the Wharton School of Business at the University of
Pennsylvania. Saaty found that decision makers facing
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a multitude of elements in a complex situation innately

FIGURE 2 Hierarchical diagram of working group team organized them into groups sharing common proper-
membership selection criteria. (Color figure available online.)
ties and then organized those groups into higher level
groups, and so on, until a top element or goal was
attributes, it was useful to prioritize these attributes identified. This is called a hierarchy, and when making
and use them as criteria for nominations. informed judgments to estimate importance, prefer-
ence, or likelihood, both tangible and intangible factors
Step 2.1—Identifying WG Team must be included and measured.
Modern QFD uses Saaty’s analytic hierarchy process
Membership Nomination Criteria (AHP; Saaty 1990) technique to manage this process in
Private conversations with U.S. TAG69 members pro- a manner that captures the intuitive understanding of
duced a number of positive and negative cautions about the participants and also yields mathematically stable
managing a team of volunteer subject-matter experts. results expressed in a numerical ratio scale. A numeri-
The expression ‘‘herding cats’’ comes to mind. It was cal ratio scale is preferred for the following reasons:

FIGURE 3 AHP-derived prioritized working group membership selection criteria. (Color figure available online.)

439 Reviews of Standards and Related Materials

 . Numerical priorities can be applied to later Dr. Catherine Chan (Hong Kong, China, Hong Kong
analyses to derive downstream priorities. This will QFD Association)
be important in guiding the developers and imple- Dr. Georg Herzwurm (Germany, University of
menters of new solutions. Stuttgart, QFD Institute Deutschland)
. Ratio scale priorities show precisely how much Dr. Robert Hunt (Australia, Macquarie University)
more important one issue is than another. Ordinal Dr. Aysun Kapucugil (Turkey, Dokuz Eylul University)
scales only indicate rank order but not the magni- Mr. Glenn Mazur (United States, QFD Institute)
tude of importance. Dr. Paulo Augusto Cauchick Miguel (Brazil, Univer-
. Numerical scales can be tested for judgment incon- sity of Sao Paulo)
sistency, sensitivity, and other useful properties. Dr. Hisakazu Shindo (Japan, Yamanashi University)
Because AHP does not require rational responses, Dr. Kim Stanfield (UK, CSC Corporation)
an inconsistency check will quantify and identify
judgment inconsistencies by looking for instances The first formal WG2 interim meeting was held
of a > b, b > c, but c > a, etc. prior to the 2010 International Symposium on QFD
in Portland, Oregon, and was attended by 8 of the
The hierarchy was prioritized by the same U.S. above 10 members. At this meeting, several projects
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TAG69 members who advised on the criteria. The and teams were formed to begin writing the draft,
AHP method has the leaves of each hierarchical and deadlines were established. Additional interim
branch compared pair-wise using a verbal scale to WebEx conference calls were also scheduled. The
determine which of the pair is more important and project teams were as follows:
by how much. The verbal scale is as follows: equally
important, moderately more important, strongly 1. Voice of customer—engineers
more important, very strongly more important, or 2. Review of the Japanese standard Q-9025
extremely more important. A pair-wise survey was 3. Architecture and structure of standard
e-mailed and the results were entered into an AHP 4. Scope setting
matrix from which the right principle eigenvector 5. QFD in design life cycle
was calculated to approximate the ratio scale priori- 6. ISO terminology alignment
ties shown in Figure 3. 7. QFD definitions
8. QFD principles
9. Minimum QFD effort
Step 2.3—Nominating WG Members 10. QFD methods
Based on the above weighted criteria, individuals 11. Related methods bibliography
were evaluated according to how well they met the 12. Integration of all work in first draft
criteria. Because this is to be an international stan-
dard, members from the worldwide QFD com-
munity were considered first. These included QFD
leaders from countries that had hosted one or more Step 3—Voice of the Customer—
international symposia on QFD. Members were
then asked to join their country’s ISO member body
Engineers
so that they could participate and vote fully. QFD, at its core, is about designing in customer
These individuals are also country representatives satisfaction from the beginning in order to assure
of the ICQFD and the chairman of the SC8 recom- first-pass quality acceptance. This requires that the
mended that the ICQFD be appointed a liaison developers understand clearly what customers want
organization of the SC8. ICQFD members, in alpha- before design work begins. Though QFD is widely
betical order: used in manufactured products, service products,
and software products, I believe it was best to start
Ms. Veronica Gonzalez Bosch (Mexico, ITESM and with the voice of engineers who would use this
QFD-LAT) QFD standard in the process of developing new pro-
Dr. Nicklas Bylund (Sweden, Sandvik Corporation) ducts for their companies.

G. Mazur 440
 TABLE 1 Voice of the customer table for aerospace engineers (partial)
Segment VOC (Standards User) Customer needs Design ideas

Aerospace Engineer Where to look standard, how Easy to find when I need it. Put ISO links on ICQFD member
to find websites?
differs from our std Easy to know how stand differs
from our internal standards.
simple enough for average Easy for non-QFD specialist to
person to understand understand.
too loosey-goosey-is it worth Standard is useful to my work. Sufficient detail. Role specific
the trouble (marketing, design,
engineering, manufacturing,
quality, supply chain, etc.)
morphs over time to cover new I am always from the current Ongoing VOC feedback
req’t-are we using current versio. I know when next version gathering.
version? User wants to stay will be released so I can plan for
up to date with standard, it. Standard is useful to my
offer suggestions on how to future work.
improve or make more
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relevant.
have multiple implementation Standard is easy for beginners to Multiple implementation levels.
levels within the standard. utilize. Standard is useful to my
Common level, plus special work.
areas with more meat.
make sure your customer and Benefits of following standardare
vendors buy into the easy to explain to my customers.
standard-cost=benefit ratio. Easy for my vendors to follow
the standard. Easy to follow
standsrd.
easily accommodate changes in Standard is easy to adapt to Publish case studies?
my business as technology changes in my business.
changes.
make something people want Standard is useul to my work. Easy
to use. must be easy to use, to follow standard.
especially if voluntary.
must be on website. Best if no Easy to find standard when I need Standard published website.
charge because of the effort it. Benefits of following
to rationalize to my boss or standard are easy to explain to
company the need to pay for my mamagement.
the documentation.

Step 3.1—Identify Users of the receive. Instead, we looked at industries that were
most recently adopting QFD methods and selected
QFD Standard
aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and infor-
Most development projects today struggle to mation technology business architects. The next step
meet all requirements of all users and must accept was to identify representatives from these industries
that at best they should focus on meeting the most for in-depth interviews in order to capture the voice
important requirements of the most important users. of the customer.
In a business environment, user importance can be
measured by such criteria as revenue potential, prof-
Step 3.2—Capturing and Analyzing
itability, market share, and other financial metrics. In
ISO standards development, financial benefit is the Voice of the Customer
replaced by the sense of professional contribution Voice of the customer starts our analysis of true
and recognition the volunteer team members customer needs, which QFD defines as the following

441 Reviews of Standards and Related Materials

 the global weights (indicated after G:), these
customer needs were the highest priority for the
standard:

. QFD standard helps my products get certified (G:

0.134).
. QFD standard helps me meet regulatory require-
ments (G: 0.103).

In other words, the QFD standard is most needed

to help engineers get their products to pass other
standards and requirements.

Step 4—Developing and Writing

the Draft Standard
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Based on the above customer needs, critical parts

FIGURE 4 Prioritized hierarchy of customer needs for QFD
standard. (Color figure available online.)
of the standard were written. At the time of this writ-
ing, the first draft was submitted to the ISO in June
2011. The draft generated intense interest in other
benefits to the customer: a problem solved, an
ISO technical committees, particularly TC176, which
opportunity enabled, or an image enhanced, inde-
is responsible for quality management. TC69=SC8=
pendent of the solution. This is absolutely critical
WG2 asked to coordinate with TC176=SC3 and have
because customers, trying to be helpful, may suggest
since drafted a new outline to include additional
ways in which we can do things better. This presents
scope and materials. This is currently under develop-
two problems: (1) for the customer, better means bet-
ment. A new timeline is also under construction.
ter for me and may create conflict with better for
another customer and (2) customer suggestions are
based on their past experience—hardly the fodder CONCLUSION
for developing new and potentially game-changing Harnessing volunteer subject-matter experts is dif-
solutions based on emerging technology. So, the ficult. Having a plan for drafting a new standard was
QFD process encourages us to ask the customers treated like any other new product development
what benefit they are seeking. This helps us think project, and QFD tools and methods were employed
outside the box for solutions (if the need later turns to find focus and direct efforts where they matter the
out to have high priority) and not waste precious most to prospective users of the standard. A
team time on solutions to low-priority needs. The follow-up paper is proposed to document the next
QFD tool for analyzing customer needs and translat- steps in creating the final document.
ing into true customer needs is the customer voice
table, exemplified in Table 1.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Step 3.3—Prioritizing Glenn H. Mazur, B.A., M.B.A., and QFD Red
Belt1, has been active in QFD since its inception in
Customer Needs North America and has worked extensively with
Using the hierarchy diagram and AHP described the founders of QFD on their teaching and consult-
above, users were asked to prioritize the needs from ing visits from Japan. He is a leader in the application
the voice of customer tables. The hierarchy had 51 of QFD to service industries and consumer products,
customer needs at the tertiary level of the hierarchy, conducts advanced QFD research, and is the con-
which is shown with priorities in Figure 4. Based on ference chair for the annual North American

G. Mazur 442
 Symposium on Quality Function Deployment. Glenn academician of the International Academy for Qual-
is the Executive Director of the QFD Institute and ity. He is the honorary president of the Hong Kong
International Council for QFD, adjunct lecturer on QFD Association.
TQM at the University of Michigan College of Engin-
eering (ret.), President of Japan Business Consultants
Ltd., and a senior member of the American Society
for Quality (ASQ) and the Japanese Society for Qual-
REFERENCES
ity Control (JSQC). He is a certified QFD Red Belt1 Akao, Y., Ed. (1990). Quality Function Deployment: Integrating Customer
Requirements into Product Design. Translated by Glenn Mazur.
(highest level), one of two in North America. He is
Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press.
a certified QFD-Architekt #A21907 by QFD Institut Mizuno, S., Akao, Y., Eds. (1994). QFD: the Customer Driven Approach to
Deutschland. He is convenor of the ISO Technical Quality Planning and Deployment. Translated by Glenn Mazur. Tokyo:
Asian Productivity Organization.
Committee 69 Subcommittee 8 Working Group 2 to Saaty, T. L. (1990). The Analytic Hierarchy Process. Pittsburgh, PA: RWS
write an international standard for QFD. He is an Publications.
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443 Reviews of Standards and Related Materials