Quality Function Deployment - Carry out a QFD assessment. & Submit a Essay

Quality Function Deployment - Carry out a QFD assessment. & Submit a completed 'House of Quality' diagram to show the results - Essay Example The first brick or building block should give us some information about what our target audience wants. Analyzing performance of our hand held battery operated drill among the target audience of small business operators they gave us answers in deep expecting â€Å"Voice of the Customer† that main features they require from a hand held drill are time of operation before it needs recharging, its weight as they have to carry it and hammering speed if they need to drill into concrete. (Akao, Yoji., 1990) They were not concerned about other features like durability, parts and service availability, warranty, price or maintenance so we did not have to group customer wishes into smaller groups in a way of affinity or a tree diagram. In our next step we encounter Planning Matrix at the right side of QFD house modeled matrix. Its function is many-fold as it quantifies the â€Å"Voice of the Customer† and allows for its adjustments with the issues concerning the design team. (Gibs on, J., 1995) First we need to get our customers rate how important is for them chosen requirement that we found asking them on the left side of the house. (Gaucher, E., Coffey R., 1993) We can gather this information by questionnaires where customers can rate how important the feature is for them on a scale from 1-5 or 1-10 or we can use analytical hierarchy process by combining two features and asking them which one means more to them. The second method requires a little more work on our side. At the same time when we already have a customer willing to cooperate we should also ask if she/he can evaluate his satisfaction with our product and some competitors products as a whole and by separate features. Once done and statistically measured this number are basis for comparison and calculations of Planned Satisfaction Rating, Improvement Factor, Sales Point, and Overall Weighting. Our customers gave us Feature Importance rating of 4.5 for ability to work longer without recharging 2.7 for having hammering ability and 1.8 to be light to carry around. They marked our product with 3.6 for battery life, 1.8 for easy carrying and 3.1 for hammering ability. Competitor A and B got the following marks respectively: battery life 3.2 and 2.9, easy to carry 2.9 and 3.7, and for hammering ability 1 and 4.4. (Akao, Y., 1990) Our guys from technical department added a column for Planned Satisfaction Rating at 4 for battery life, 2 for easy carry and unchanged for hammering ability. Thus improvement factor for battery life came at 1.4, for easy to carry feature at 1.2 and unchanged 1 for hammering ability. We thought that battery life could be our next sales point so we added additional 1.5 weights to it from sales perspective. (Cooper, R., 1993) The third building block oh the â€Å"House of Quality† matrix consists of technical requirements recognized as the Voice of the Company. (Gibson, J., 1995, p.8) QFD team here identifies all measurable characteristics of the pr oduct as they relate to customer wish list. A line can be added here that shows whether we need to increase or decrease the feature as decrease to make it lighter or increase to make it last longer. In our case we noted battery life increase requirement and weight decrease requirement while we think that we are on the money with one hammering speed. In the middle section of the â€Å"House of Quality† matrix we assign different weights to relationships. This is rather subjective and may lead to wrong