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Unit 11: Quality Function Deployment

customer would be satisfied,” lamented Dr. Yoji Akao, one of the founders of QFD, in his private Notes
lectures.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was developed to bring this personal interface to modern
manufacturing and business. In today’s industrial society, where the growing distance between
producers and users is a concern, QFD links the needs of the customer (end-user) with design,
development, engineering, manufacturing, and service functions.
QFD is a comprehensive quality system that systematically links the needs of the customer with
various business functions and organizational processes, such as marketing, design, quality,
production, manufacturing, sales, etc., aligning the entire company toward achieving a common
goal.
It does so by seeking both spoken and unspoken needs, identifying positive quality and business
opportunities, and translating these into actions and designs by using transparent analytic and
prioritization methods, empowering organizations to exceed normal expectations and provide
a level of unanticipated excitement that generates value.

The QFD methodology can be used for both tangible products and non-tangible services,
including manufactured goods, service industry, software products, IT projects, business process
development, government, healthcare, environmental initiatives, and many other applications.

11.2 Development of Quality Function Deployment

QFD was developed in Japan in the late 1960s by Professors Shigeru Mizuno and Yoji Akao.
At the time, statistical quality control, which was introduced after World War II, had taken roots
in the Japanese manufacturing industry, and the quality activities were being integrated with
the teachings of such notable scholars as Dr. Juran, Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, and Dr. Feigenbaum that
emphasized the importance of making quality control a part of business management, which
eventually became known as TQC and TQM.

Did u know? The technique of QFD was invented by Akashi Fukuhara of Japan and first
applied with very good results at Toyota.
The purpose of Professors Mizuno and Akao was to develop a quality assurance method that
would design customer satisfaction into a product before it was manufacturer. Prior quality
control methods were primarily aimed at fixing a problem during or after manufacturing.
The first large scale application was presented in 1966 by Kiyotaka Oshiumi of Bridgestone Tire
in Japan, which used a process assurance items fishbone diagram to identify each customer
requirement (effect) and to identify the design substitute quality characteristics and process
factors (causes) needed to control and measure it.
In 1972, with the application of QFD to the design of an oil tanker at the Kobe Shipyards of
Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, the fishbone diagrams grew unwieldy. Since the effects shared
multiple causes, the fishbone could be refashioned into a spreadsheet or matrix format with the
rows being desired effects of customer satisfaction and the columns being the controlling and
measurable causes.
At the same time, Katsuyoshi Ishihara introduced the Value Engineering principles used to
describe how a product and its components work. He expanded this to describe business functions
necessary to assure quality of the design process itself.

Merged with these new ideas, QFD eventually became the comprehensive quality design system
for both product and business process.

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