When beginning an industry or a business, the primary target of the owner of the company is to satisfy his or her customers, whether internally or externally. However, the methodology or procedure to know precisely what your customers need may be a challenge, according to Armellini et al. (2017). Quality function deployment is one of the best methods to keenly evaluate what the customers require in an organization and provide the expected feedback that will fully satisfy the customers. The organization owners in Japan first applied the use of quality function deployment in the year 1960, according to Ashrafuzzaman et al. (2016).
During this period, they effectively analyzed the customers’ needs and responded to them. This method brought meaningful results to the industries in Japan, and because of that, it was applied in the United States of America in the year 1980. According to statistics, this methodology has had many positive impacts on the automotive industry.
Barad (2018) says that when applying the quality function deployment in an organization, the management of that business should use a product or service in the organization. QFD incorporates about seven leadership and preparation materials to meet the customers’ needs. It then arranges the priorities in a way that the customers will automatically choose them. The leadership tools that direct the decisions in QFD comprise the interaction matrix, features of the product, relationship matrix, impact rating, technical challenges, competitive technical benchmark, and lastly, the target values, citing the work of bin Ahmad Shamsuddin et al. (2015). When the organization has identified the product or service, the high seven pillars are applied systematically until the customer’s priority is determined. For instance, the QFD starts with the first matrix to identify the most effective quality of the product. The attributes of the product or the service will comprise the needs, compulsions, and wows of the potential customers in the market. After the identification of these characteristics, the quality function deployment uses the business purpose to focus on the next step. This step puts the customers’ priorities in the particular organization.
This assignment is going to analyze the use of quality function deployment methodology in an organization selling phones to identify the customers’ needs. When applying the QFD procedure to this product, the business will take various steps to satisfy the customers fully. The first procedure is to get the customer’s needs in the phone category. The customers may be having a range of needs; it is the work of the business to systematize the requirements as the first step in QFD. Franceschini (2016) says that after that, the second step is to figure out the impact of the conditions collected on the phone that the organization wants to sell.
Some requirements are featherweight at this stage; they should be wiped out from the list and focus on the critical needs that will truly satisfy the customers. According to the QFD method, after determining the weight of all the requirements, the business should now change the selected elements into a practical one. For instance, if customers require specific apps on their phones, the organization should check on this. In addition to that, the customers may also need the phone to have a particular design; the business should contact the technical team for support. However, while translating these needs to technical ones, the company should also make some improvements on the phone regarding the current technology; this will also satisfy the customer most. Lastly, the QFD methodology requires the industry to develop now the phone incorporating the selected requirements from the technical support team.
The other thing the organization should integrate on the phone is the design that goes with the current technology. On the other hand, a step that may bring a challenge to the organization is selecting the proper requirements from the customers that they should incorporate into the phone. However, QFD provides various ways of determining the heavyweight requirements. The best method is AHP to identify the needs. AHP gives the scale of the listed priorities. It judges the needs according to the way the customers have rated them. This method has been proven to be the best by many businesses that apply QFD to satisfy their customers.
Businesses realize benefits when they use the quality function deployment methodology, according to Sarkar & Panchal (2017). The first advantage is that the product from them, for instance, the phone, in this case, will be ranked high among the competitors when the analysis is done. Consequently, using this method makes the company hit the customer requirements directly because customers are the ones who determine what the product should be made of. Lastly, QFD reduces the time that may have been wasted during the development because there is no risk of changes.
References
Armellini, F., Pelicioni, R. A., Kaminski, P. C., & Bassetto, S. (2017). Including the voice of the client in the creative process: a case study of the integration of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to the Value Proposition Design (VPD) in the service sector. The Journal of Modern Project Management, 5(2).
Ashrafuzzaman, M., Al-Maruf, A., Mahbubul, I. M., Malek, A. A., & Mukaddes, A. M. M. (2016). Quality function deployment approach to measure supply chain performance: a case study on garments accessories industries. International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 22(1), 96-120.
Barad, M. (2018). Quality Function Deployment (QFD). In Strategies and Techniques for Quality and Flexibility (pp. 101-121). Springer, Cham.
Bin Ahmad Shamsuddin, D. M., Chew, B. C., & Shin, L. H. (2015). QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT FOR BIO PLASTICS ADOPTION IN MALAYSIAN INDUSTRY. Journal of Technology Management and Business, 2(2).
Franceschini, F. (2016). Advanced quality function deployment. CRC Press.
Sarkar, D., & Panchal, R. (2017). Quality Function Deployment (QFD): A Six Sigma Tool for Performance Monitoring of Ready Mixed Concrete. framework, 4(2).
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