Quality Function Deployment is a “comprehensive process for improving the communication and coordination among engineering, marketing and manufacturing personnel.” It helps compare what the customer wants against product attributes to help them make decisions. Using quality function deployment a company can look at all of the potential improvement projects and then see how they will impact the different things a company needs to achieve to drive improvement within a business. By going through a scoring matrix, and organizing them a business can see what is most important and allows them to easier prioritize what to do first.
QFD helps to provide a framework for the decision making, and many maintain that one of its “most valuable characteristics is its positive effect upon cross-functional communication and, through that, upon cycle time and the product/customer fit.” QFD Online is a company who has taken these ideas and turned them into a business idea where they have developed programs to help companies easier implement quality function deployment. They have recently announced the beta release of their online QFD software, which is browser based and allows companies to build unlimited rows and columns, sort by many different functions and allow multi-user collaboration. The company currently offers free trials of their software and asks for feedback from customers. I think that this is a great way to get information back on how the program is working as well as recruit companies to use it in their daily work.
Schilling, Melissa A. Strategic Management of Technological Innovation. New York: n.p., 2008.
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