Page 165 - DMGT524_TOTAL_QUALITY_MANAGEMENT

Total Quality Management

Notes with obtaining customer requirements through market research. These research results are
inputs into the House of Quality. Below is a discussion of each of the rooms of the House of
Quality and how they are built.
The “Whats” Room: Typically there are many customer requirements, but using a technique
called affinity diagramming, the team distils these many requirements into the 20 or 30 most
important needs. The affinity diagramming process is critical to the success of QFD in that there
is vigorous discussion to reach consensus as to what the customers really meant by their
comments. This is a powerful technique for reconciling the different interpretations held by
marketing, design engineering or field service. The affinity diagramming process usually takes
about one to two solid team days to complete, depending on how narrow or global the objective
is. The results from the affinity diagramming are placed into the “Whats” room in the HOQ.

The Importance Ratings and Customer Competitive Assessment Rooms: Marketing and/or the
market researcher designs the market research so that the team can use the results as inputs to
successfully complete the Importance Ratings and Customer Competitive Assessment rooms.
These rooms are located on the matrix where benefit rankings and ratings are assembled for
analysis. The Importance Rankings provide the team with a prioritization of customer
requirements while the Customer Competitive Assessment allows us to spot strengths and
weaknesses in both our product and the competition’s products.
The “Hows” Room: The next step is the completion of the “Hows” room. In this activity the
entire team asks for each “What”, “How would we measure product performance which would
provide us an indication of customer satisfaction for this specific ‘What’?” The team needs to
come up with at least one product performance measure, but sometimes the team recognizes
that it takes several measures to adequately characterize product performance.
Relationships Matrix Room: After the “Hows” room has been completed, the team begins to
explore the relationships between all “Whats” and all “Hows” as they complete the Relationships
Matrix room. During this task the team systematically asks, “What is the relationship between
this specific ‘how’ and this specific ‘what’?” “Is there cause and effect between the two?” This is
a consensus decision within the group. Based on the group decision, the team assigns a strong,
medium, weak or no relationship value to this specific “what/how” pairing. Then the team goes
on to the next “what/how” pairing. This process continues until all “what/how” pairings have
been reviewed. The technical community begins to assume team leadership in these areas.
Absolute Score and Relative Score Rooms: Once the Relationships Matrix room has been
completed, the team can then move on to the Absolute Score and Relative Score rooms. This is
where the team creates a model or hypothesis as to how product performance contributes to
customer satisfaction. Based on the Importance Ratings and the Relationship Matrix values, the
team calculates the Absolute and Relative Scores. These calculations are the team’s best estimate
as to which product performance measures (“hows”) exert the greatest impact on overall customer
satisfaction. Engineering now begins to know where the product has got to measure up strongly
in order to beat the competition.

The last three rooms receive the most input from the technical side of the team, but total team
involvement is still vital.
Correlation Matrix Room: There are times in many products where customer requirements
translate into physical design elements which conflict with one another; these conflicts are
usually reflected in the product “hows”. The Correlation Matrix room is used to help resolve
these conflicts by highlighting those “hows” which have are share the greatest conflict.
For example, let’s say that the “how” called “weight” should be minimized for greatest customer
satisfaction. At the same time there might be two other “hows” titled “strength” and “power

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