Quality Function Deployment (QFD) - A multi-purpose structured framework

The essence of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a product planning quality technique, is to extract the customer needs or desires, expressed in his/her own words, and then to translate them, using sequential QFD matrices, into technical product quality characteristics, planning, design, process and production. However, QFD is not limited to product planning. It is a structured multi-purpose framework, which can be used to translate improvement needs of various systems into prioritized improvement activities. The two published applications reviewed here show how this framework had been used in different contexts. One application prioritized actions for improving the implementation of an enterprise manufacturing strategy. The other application deployed flexibility in supply chains. Both applications started at the strategic level, with the strategic improvement needs of enterprises, but their respective QFD deployment matrices were different and led to different final outputs.