Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a robust, collaborative methodology to systematically bridge the gap between customer needs and the product specifications and technical requirements that best address those needs.

QFD translates Voice of the Customer findings into the product specifications that engineers and others involved in developing new products can use. It is most often a facilitated session where a cross-functional team creates and populates a series of one or more matrices, the first and most common of which is referred to as the House of Quality (HOQ). If you would like more background about what QFD is and how it works, Applied Marketing Science (AMS) has written a short, easy-to-read article on the subject for the Wiley Encyclopedia of International Marketing.

Following the best practices identified in AMS co-founder John Hauser’s acclaimed Harvard Business Review article on QFD, called “The House of Quality,” AMS has facilitated QFD sessions with hundreds of product developers across a variety of industries, including high tech, medical devices, consumer durables, industrial components and heavy equipment.

AMS has innovated the QFD process, making it faster and more actionable. The result is Express QFD®. Express QFD® takes far less time than traditional QFD, makes better use of the data, and provides team members with clear next steps they should take for each product capability.

With Express QFD® from AMS, your product innovation team can feel confident that important customer needs will be met with a well-targeted, state-of-the-art design. The team will emerge from the process knowing exactly what to work on, with a common frame of reference and knowledge base that will facilitate communication and teamwork throughout the development process