- Business Issues addressed by QFD
- Competitive Product Positioning – QFD enables specific competitive positioning targets that are communicated throughout the organization and provides a shared focus for management and project team.
- Product Portfolio Management – Application of QFD provides a unique opportunity to not only define what the current new product should be all about but also what constitutes better as technologies improves.
- Technology Planning – QFD provides visibility to technology shortcomings and focus for future technology needs.
- Timely progress communication (to support stage-gate process) – Each step in the QFD process produces the exact data needed for decisions to be made by management at each gate in the product development process.
- Meaningful definition of Critical Parameters for DFSS process – The QFD process enables the project team to identify the most critical parameters needed to obtain the competitive positioning that will be critical for the success of the project.
- Data driven decisions – The QFD process limits the reliance on subjective opinions to make key decisions by letting decisions be driven by data collected from customers.
- Traceability of decisions and intent (requirements management) – The proper execution of QFD leaves an organization with traceability of requirements and design decisions all the way back to the initial targeted customer and business needs.
Traditional market and consumer research doesn’t really get a clear picture of the true product benefits most desired by customers. Too often qualitative interviews ask customers about features they want or like and stops short of probing deeply to understand why customer want what they want. This deeper understanding of customer motivation is needed to put together enough unrealized knowledge to develop innovative and different products that can win new customers and keep old customers.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is the systematic process planners need to help understand why customers want what they want. QFD uses cross-functional teams to identify, understand and document unrealized knowledge involved in planning products, processes, services and strategies which become better then what the competition has to offer.
QFDcapture Professional Edition is the indispensable tool for any planning process, from basic to complex. The software has a decision model focus (the Roadmap), rather than a single House of Quality (HoQ) focus. Having a decision model focus means you can set up and interlink a collection of lists, matrices, and documents to construct a decision making model for your project. This decision making model can be high level (a single HoQ) or detailed (many HoQs cascaded from one to another) or something in-between.
A QFDcapture model enables you to collect, analyze and manage qualitative data to give you an accurate understanding of your competition space, your customer expectations, the constraints regulation impose and the needs of your business. The model will also:
- Help you develop a prioritized list of what customers expect to see in your products, services or strategies
- Help you translate customer expectations into specifications your designers can understand and act on
- Help you develop an ordered list of what steps your company must take to satisfy customer requirements
- Help you plan products, services or strategies with fewer mid-point corrections
QFDcapture Professional Edition Features Include:
- Project Roadmap – Layout a House of Quality (HoQ) set to completely model the QFD process you wish to follow (EQFD, Goal, Four Phase, Simple etc.)
- QFD Models of any Degree of Complexity – Combine spreadsheets and matrices as you wish to create all the types of HoQs available to the QFD process
- Market Opportunity Maps – Produce Market Opportunity Map reports identifying the best opportunities for product improvement.
- Relationship Tree – Generate relationship tree diagrams showing measures for each requirement in a graphical tree and branch format.
- Templates – Print out and work with blank chart templates which are useful as documents-in-progress during team meetings.
- Printing Spreadsheets – Print out spreadsheets as they appear in QFDcapture.
- Larger Applications – Very large QFD models can be developed with QFDcapture
QFDcapture System Requirements:
- Windows 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7
Join the 5000+ worldwide companies, universities and government agencies that use QFDcapture as their QFD documentation, analysis and planning tool. Successful QFD can be tedious, time consuming and discouraging unless you automate the process with a tool like QFDcapture.