Make a house of quality in quality management in construction

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is basically a planning process with a quality approach to new product design, development, and implementation driven by customer needs and values. QFD has been successfully used by many world-class organizations in automobiles, ship building, electronics, aerospace, utilities, leisure and entertainment, financial, software, and other industries. QFD is a structured approach to defining customer needs or requirements and translating them into specific plans to produce products to meet those needs. The “voice of the customer” is the term to describe these stated and unstated customer needs or requirements. The voice of the customer is captured in a variety of ways: direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data, field reports, etc. This understanding of the customer needs is then summarized in a product planning matrix or “house of quality”.