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One reader asked recently:
“I have heard that it can take up to 18 months!! to complete a
House of Quality. Is it possible? The company involved was in
finance sector.”
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The
House of Quality
(HOQ)
is an assembly of several deployment hierarchies and tables.
These include the Demanded Quality Hierarchy, Quality
Characteristics Hierarchy, the relationships
matrix which relates them using any one of several
distribution methods, the Quality Planning Table, and Design Planning Table.
Deployment and manageability of a House of Quality seems to
be one recurring nightmare for some. Here is our reply.
You, too, may find it useful.
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Dear Reader:
Thank you for your interest in QFD.
We understand your concern for the amount of time required
to do QFD.
Here are some reasons why QFD could take too long:
1) You do not have a
QFD
process tailored to the needs of your business.
Instead, you are trying to fit your business and project
model into a QFD process designed for some other business.
There is no one-size-fits-all QFD.
2) You think that the House of Quality matrix (HOQ) is a
necessary part of QFD.
The HOQ is just
one
of many
specialized tools in QFD. In fact, it may be unnecessary.
Dr.
Akao,
the founder of QFD, has said numerous times, "A House of
Quality is not QFD."
Many people, who haphazardly learned QFD some 20 years ago
and failed to update their knowledge since then, still think
that HOQ is a necessary part of QFD and that creating this
matrix solves everything. This is not a wise way to do QFD
because it limits your ability to apply QFD only in the most
elementary form, or worse, it may take you to a wrong
direction, causing your outcome invalid. In Modern QFD,
there are other tools that are more agile and efficient than
HOQ.
3) You are
confused about how the House of Quality works with other
tools and matrices. You are trying to put all your data into
one matrix.
In a worst
case scenario, one manufacturing company tried to put all
their
data into a single matrix. It produced over 1,000 rows and
1,000 columns. This
meant
that the team had to examine over one million intersecting
cells — an impossible job that was abandoned in th e middle.
Additionally,
for your QFD analysis to be effective, customer
needs should be independent of the product or solution. This
is where people often err because they do not have solid
Modern QFD
basics to distinguish the two and they cannot determine
whether or not the use of HOQ is a good match for what they
are trying to achieve.
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QFD uses several tools iteratively. In fact, each data type
can have its own "mini-matrix" that is far more efficient
than a mammoth matrix.
To apply QFD effectively, you have to know which tool in
which sequence is most appropriate for what you are trying
to achieve.
Using the wrong tool in the wrong process leads to an
excessively time-consuming process and ineffective results.
Even the type of industry sector may have no bearing on the
amount of time required for QFD.
For today’s businesses which are often under-staffed and
constrained by time and budget, the QFD Institute’s
streamlined QFD methods may be more appropriate for your
downsized resources.
In particular,
Blitz QFD® developed by our instructors and
incorporated into the QFD Green Belt® Course minimizes the
amount of time to execute QFD. This highly focused approach
may not even require a matrix.
Schedule Deployment, taught in the
QFD Black
Belt® Course, can additionally accelerate your
project.
As for the financial company cited above, we hope they will
take our advice and improve their use of QFD.
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