Page 244 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

214 Chapter Seven

The team should take the time required to understand customer wants
and to plan the project more thoughtfully. Using the QFD, the DFSS team
will be able to anticipate failures and avoid major downstream
changes. Quality function deployment prevents downstream changes
by an extensive planning effort at the beginning of the DFSS design or
redesign project. The team will employ marketing and product planning
inputs to deploy the customer expectations through design, process, and
production planning and across all functional departments. This will
assure resolution of issues, lean design, and focusing on those poten-
tial innovations (delighters) that are important to the customer.
Figure 7.1 shows that the company which is using QFD, places more
emphasis on responding to problems early in the design cycle.
Intuitively, it incurs more time, cost, and energy to implement a design
change at production launch than at the concept phase because more
resources are required to resolve problems than to preclude their
occurrence in the first place.
QFD translates customer needs and expectations into appropriate
design requirements. The intent of QFD is to incorporate the “voice of
the customer” into all phases of the product development cycle,
through production and into the marketplace. With QFD, quality is
defined by the customer. Customers want products, processes, and
services that throughout their lives meet customers’ needs and expec-
tations at a cost that represents value. The results of being customer-
driven are total quality excellence, greater customer satisfaction,
increased market share, and potential growth.
The real value of QFD is its ability to direct the application of other
DFSS tools, such as SPC and robustness, to those entities that will have

Expected
Resource Level
With QFD Actual Resource

Post Release
Resource

Unplanned
Resources

Time
Figure 7.1 QFD effect on project resources.