DESIGN FOR QUALITY
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
1. Idea Generation: Idea generation often focuses on exciters and
delighters.
2. Preliminary Concept Development: The ideas are studied for
feasibility. Will the product meet customer requirements? Can it be
manufactured economically with high quality?
3. Product/Process Development: Specifications are developed.
Prototype testing is done.
4. Full-Scale Production: Once the design is approved and the
production process has been set up, the company releases the
product to manufacturing or service delivery teams.
5. Market Introduction: The product is distributed to customers.
6. Market Evaluation: Customer feedback to initiate continuous
improvements.
CONCURRENT ENGINEERING
• To survive in today’s highly competitive environment, companies have
to come out with new products quickly.
• Different functions such as marketing, engineering and manufacturing
have to involve and cooperate.
• Concurrent engineering is a process in which all major functions
involved with bringing a product to market are continuously involved
with product development from conception through sales.
• Team of 4 to 20 members are involved.
BENEFITS OF CONCURRENT
ENGINEERING
• The product development time is shortened.
• The final product is more suitable to the market conditions at the
time of introduction.
• Improved quality
• Lower costs
CONCURRENT ENGINEERING AT
RITZ CARLTON
Before any major event, cross-functional teams comprising of suppliers
and hotel staff verify production and delivery capabilities, critique
samples and assess results.
QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT
(QFD)
• QFD is simply a planning process to guide the design, manufacturing, and
marketing of goods by integrating the voice of the customer throughout the
organization.
• QFD originated in 1972 at Mitsubishi’s Kobe shipyard site. Toyota began to
develop the concept shortly thereafter.
• Automobile, Electronic, Appliance, Clothing companies thesedays are using
QFD.
• Customer’s voice drives all operations under QFD. Not top management or
desires of design engineers.
• If customer need is identified in the first place, waste of effort and time in
redesigning can be eliminated.
• QFD uses a set of linked matrixes to ensure that the voice of the
customer is carried throughout the production/delivery process.
• We will focus on the first matrix, the customer requirement planning
matrix (House of Quality).
House of Quality
To understand House of Quality and the QFD process; let’s look at an
example where a fitness centre is being designed in a locality with two
other competing organizations.
House of Quality has six basic steps which we will take a look.
1. Identify customer requirements
• The voice of the customer is the primary input to the QFD process.
• The most critical and most difficult step of the process is to capture
the essence of the customer’s needs and expectations.
• The customer’s own words are vitally important in preventing
misinterpretation by designers and engineers.
• For this fitness centre example, the voice of the customer is grouped
into five categories: programs and activities, facilities, atmosphere,
staff and other.
2. Identify technical requirements
• Technical requirements are measurable design characteristics that
describe the customer requirements as expressed in the language of
the designer or engineer.
• Essentially, they are the “hows” by which the company will respond to
the “whats”.
• They must be measurable.
• The roof of the House of Quality shows the interrelationships
between any pair of technical requirements. Thus, design decisions
cannot be viewed in isolation. This relationship matrix helps to
evaluate trade-offs.
3. Relate the customer requirements
to the technical requirements
• The purpose of the relationship matrix is to show whether the final
technical requirements adequately address customer requirements.
• This assessment is usually based on expert experience, customer
responses, or controlled experiments.
• The lack of a strong relationship between a customer requirement
and any technical requirement shows that the customer requirement
has not been addressed.
• If a technical requirement does not affect any customer requirement,
it may be redundant or the designers may have missed some
important customer need.
4. Evaluate competing products or
services
• This step identifies importance ratings for each customer requirement
and evaluates competitors 'existing products or services for each of
them.
• This evaluation highlights the strengths and weaknesses in competing
products.
• If an important customer requirement receives a low evaluation on all
competitors’ products (for instance, “family activities available”), then
by focusing on this need a company might gain a competitive
advantage. Such requirements become key selling points and the
basis for formulating marketing strategies.
5. Evaluate technical requirements
and develop targets
• This step is usually accomplished through intelligence gathering or
product testing and then translated into measurable terms.
• These evaluations are compared with the competitive evaluation of
customer requirements to determine inconsistencies between
customer requirements and technical requirement.
• On the basis of customer importance ratings and existing product
strengths and weaknesses, targets for each technical requirement are
set.
[Link] which technical requirements to deploy
in the remainder of the production/delivery process
• These technical characteristics have the highest priority and need to
be deployed throughout the remainder of the design and production
process to maintain a responsiveness to the voice of the customer.
• Those characteristics not identified as critical do not need such
rigorous attention.