Quality Function Deployment and Its Applications

Quality Function Deployment, or QFD, is a tool that can help improve your existing processes by focusing your energy and your attention on efforts that will ensure the greatest result. QFD works by first identifying and prioritizing customer requirements and expectations. You then can use this information to focus with greater confidence on the important customer requirements as a starting place to define such things as product requirements, design features, manufacturing processes or support requirements. The effort and discipline of Quality Function Deployment produces the greatest results in situations in which customer requirements have not or cannot be sharply defined, those requirements cannot be met through conventional processes or practices, or the elements of the business that must work together to deliver the requirements have divergent or conflicting goals.