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Quality Function Deployment (QFD)
Quality Function Deployment (QFD), also known as The House of Quality, is the best device
ever created to tie product and service design decisions directly to customer wants and
needs, i.e. The Voice of the Customer (VOC),
and has led to a host of successful breakthrough products. QFD is designed to deploy
Voice of the Customer input throughout the design, production, marketing, and delivery facets of a
given product or service. In a typical QFD application, a cross-functional team creates
and analyzes a matrix linking customer wants and needs, identified through the Voice of the Customer,
to a set of product and service design metrics that the company can then measure and control.
AMS co-founder John Hauser, Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management,
co-authored the first widely-read English paper about this breakthrough product development
technique: “The House of Quality” (Harvard Business Review, May-June 1988). Through our
close ties to Professor Hauser, AMS has been a leading practitioner of QFD, having led
scores of projects for our clients in a wide array of product and service industries.
Our approach to QFD has been enhanced and refined over the years and offers several key
benefits:
- A formal, rigorously-derived Voice of the Customer -
Without a well-executed Voice of the Customer, QFD results will be compromised.
AMS is a worldwide leader in Voice of the Customer design and implementation, having conducted
well over 300 studies in the past 10 years.
- A highly efficient process - QFD is a labor-intensive process that
can often take a considerable length of time. We have developed ways to condense this
process by taking advantage of the latest technologies. For more information, see side 2 of our
newsletter:
Does QFD Take Too Long? (And What Can We Do About It?)
- An action orientation - We know how to maximize implementation of the
results, and how to best communicate the conclusions that emerge from the process.
To learn more, please contact us at inquiry@ams-inc.com or call Gerry Katz, Executive Vice President, at (781) 250-6303.
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