1. Traditional QFD was extracted from Japanese Comprehensive QFD by the U.S. auto industry in the 1980s for build-to-OEM-print applications. Companies that do their own design work — including part suppliers today, end product manufacturers, service, software, food and chemical products, etc. — have found that the Traditional 4-House approach does not integrate well into their new product development process and is too time-consuming.

Modern QFD is custom-tailored to identify the minimum QFD effort required with the optimum tools and sequence, making QFD more efficient and sustainable in today’s lean business environment.

2. Traditional QFD required much time to make a series of complex charts. This was fine decades ago when global competition was not anywhere near today’s level and in Japan where lifetime employment practice allowed companies to dedicate abundant manpower to create comprehensive matrices. Today’s businesses, however, face limited resources and faster time-to-market pressures from both customers and competitors.

Modern QFD is based on the Blitz QFD^® method, which replaces large, complex tools such as the House of Quality (HOQ) with smaller, faster ones that deliver the major benefits with better focus on critical customer needs—all the way from the initial marketing plan to design and development to build and delivery.

In some cases, the HOQ matrix may be still called for, of course, and we do teach it in our courses. For today’s practitioner, however, the important thing is to know when HOQ is appropriate and when it is too much team effort for the value it delivers.

3. Traditional QFD did not go deep enough into the Voice of Customer analysis, since the OEM engineers were responsible for design and there was no need to go beyond the stated customer requirement.

Modern QFD has a set of rigorous front-end tools to refine the Voice of the Customer into both spoken and unspoken customer needs. As a result, customer needs are now more precisely defined to lead to more innovative solutions—which is what today’s businesses seek.

4. Traditional QFD does not achieve the statistical rigor that Six Sigma demands. It uses ordinal scale numbers improperly for math. For example, if you use a customer rating or sales point of “5” on the 5-point rating system to compute your Customer Importance and Competitive Assessments in your Quality Planning Table or House of Quality matrix, your results would be mathematically invalid; your downstream QFD deployments are also suspect. Customer ratings and sales point numerals are called ordinal scale numbers, which tell us in what order the items are but nothing about how intervals are related. For example, if a customer rates something a “4” on the 5-point scale, does that mean it is twice as important as an item rated as a “2”? The answer is, we cannot tell.

Modern QFD has corrected this by using ratio scale math. This also allows customers to measure their satisfaction in whatever way they find appropriate, and still allow us to convert these to product measures necessary for design.

5. Modern QFD includes psychological and lifestyle needs, not just functional needs. In some product segments, consumers are making the purchase decision more and more on emotional needs and images. Lifestyle QFD connects consumers’ needs for psychological and lifestyle-enhancing solutions with your product development and branding.

6. Modern QFD includes project schedule reduction methods. Traditional QFD ignores bottlenecks caused by availability of certain experts. It assumed that experts were always available or would work overtime to finish projects. Modern QFD uses Schedule Deployment and Project Deployment based on Critical Chain Project Management to improve allocation of constrained resources and finish more projects on time.

7. Modern QFD provides a better framework for integration of other innovative methods into your product development process including TRIZ.

Your business faces a much different environment from even five years ago. At the QFD Institute we continue to draw on advancements through on-going research and education to support you.

The benefit to those who attend our QFD Belt Courses is the cutting-edge QFD knowledge and application technology that we share. Our courses include Modern QFD templates for these new tools and math.

Past attendees can update their knowledge and get semi-private coaching through the annual QFD Green Belt® Update Course and QFD Black Belt® Update Course whenever they would like and receive a complete set of the latest QFD Belt training materials.