On site training for the Product Development QFD tool

Background of the QFD tool

The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process is a structured approach to defining customer requirements and needs, and then translating them into specific plans and specifications to produce products to meet the customer needs. The customer requirements and needs are sometimes referred to as the “voice of the customer”. This is the term used to describe the stated and unstated customer requirements and needs.

The QFD tool
The QFD process is oriented toward involving a team of qualified and experienced individuals representing the various functional departments of a company that are involved in product development. This should include and not be limited to:

• Marketing
• Project Management
• Design Engineering
• Quality Assurance
• Manufacturing
• Manufacturing Engineering
• Test Engineering
• Finance
• Product Support

The QFD tools works by analysing the stated customer needs against the product concept in a matrix known as the “House of Quality“. It is in this matrix that the associations are made between the stated customer needs and the product’s ability to fulfill those needs. In this way the product specification can be adapted and modified to best meet the needs of the customer.
The House of Quality comprises rooms or steps to the QFD process. These are:

Step 1 – The Customer Requirements Room Step 2 – The Customer Importance Ratings Room Step 3 – The Customer Competitive Assessment Room Step 4 – The Functional Requirements Room – “Voice of the Engineer” Step 5 – The Direction of Improvement Room Step 6 – The Relationships Matrix Room Step 7 – The Organisational Difficulty Room Step 8 – The Technical Competitive Assessment Room Step 9 – The Target Values for Technical Descriptors Room Step 10 – The Correlation Matrix Room Step 11 – The Absolute Importance and Relative Importance Rooms

The QFD training course
The QFD tool can be used where any goods, services or processes are being developed and is used extensively in the Automotive environment. Essentially the QFD process should be applied in the development of any products where, meeting the needs of the customer very well, is important. This could be in new product concepts or if the market is very competitive and a product advantage is needed.
This one day on-site QFD training course starts with an overview of the QFD tool and the QFD process.The intent of this and all our training courses is not to tell or show the trainees what to do but to impart the capability to perform the required tasks. There is no limit to the number of trainees but we strongly recommend no more than 5 individuals attend per course. We find that if there are any more than this the training becomes ineffective and wasteful.
This course is targeted at the product design engineers, the manufacturing engineers and the programme managers delivering new products. This training course is given in English. All our courses are designed to be informal and are based around a series of discussions and practical exercises. A QFD excel template is provided.

Another great training solution from Product Development Consultants