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The House of Quality
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1988
Year
EngineeringIndustrial EngineeringKobe Shipyard SiteQuality Management SystemsSocial SciencesQuality Function DeploymentNew Product DevelopmentHousingQuality Management Systems DesignDesignProduct QualityQuality ControlMarketingIndustrial DistributionIndustrial DesignResidential DevelopmentHumanitiesQuality AssuranceLivabilityCommunication RoutinesImproved Product QualityConstruction Management
The house of quality, a QFD tool that originated at Mitsubishi in 1972 and was expanded by Toyota, maps customer desires onto product design and aligns design, manufacturing, and marketing teams for coordinated planning. QFD employs a set of planning and communication routines that coordinate skills across an organization to design, manufacture, and market products that customers want and will continue to buy. Ford and General Motors use the house of quality in more than 50 applications, and Japanese manufacturers apply it successfully to consumer electronics, appliances, clothing, integrated circuits, synthetic rubber, construction equipment, agricultural engines, and even services such as swimming schools, retail outlets, and apartment layout planning.
ITT are getting started with it. Ford and General Motors use it–at Ford alone there are more than 50 applications. The “house of quality,” the basic design tool of the management approach known as quality function deployment (QFD), originated in 1972 at Mitsubishi’s Kobe shipyard site. Toyota and its suppliers then developed it in numerous ways. The house of quality has been used successfully by Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics, home appliances, clothing, integrated circuits, synthetic rubber, construction equipment, and agricultural engines. Japanese designers use it for services like swimming schools and retail outlets and even for planning apartment layouts. A set of planning and communication routines, quality function deployment focuses and coordinates skills within an organization, first to design, then to manufacture and market goods that customers want to purchase and will continue to purchase. The foundation of the house of quality is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers’ desires and tastes–so marketing people, design engineers, and manufacturing staff must work closely together from the time a product is first conceived. The house of quality is a kind of conceptual map that provides the means for interfunctional planning and communications. People with different