Page 127 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

102 Chapter Six

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 customer expectations
through design, process, and production planning and all across functional
departments. This will assure resolution of issues, lean design, and focus on
those potential innovations (delighters) that are important to the customer.

Figure 6.1 shows that a company 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.

Quality function deployment 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 expectations at a cost that
represents value. The results of the process 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 like statistical process control (SPC) and robustness to those entities

Expected resource
level with QFD Actual resource level

Post-release
Resource

Unplanned
resources
Time
Figure 6.1 QFD Effect on Project Resources