Customer-driven product development through quality function deployment in the u.s. and japan

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment is a tool for bringing the voice of the customer into the product development process from conceptual design through to manufacturing. It begins with a matrix that links customer desires to product engineering requirements, along with competitive benchmarking information, and further matrices can be used to ultimately link this to design of the manufacturing system. Unlike other methods originally developed in the U.S. and transferred to Japan, the QFD methodology was born out of Total Quality Control (TQC) activities in Japan during the 1960s and has been transferred to companies in the U.S. This article reports on the results of a 1995 survey of more than 400 companies in the U.S. and Japan using QFD. The research questions investigated in this study were developed both inductively from QFD case studies in the U.S. and Japan and deductively from the literature. The reported results are in part counterintuitive. The U.S. companies reported a higher degree of usage, management support, cross-functional involvement, use of QFD driven data sources, and perceived benefits from using QFD. For the most part, the main uses of QFD in the U.S. were restricted to the first matrix (“House of Quality”) that links customer requirements to product engineering requirements and rarely was this carried forward to later matrices. U.S. companies were more apt to use newly collected customer data sources (e.g., focus groups) and methods for analyzing customer requirements. Japanese companies reported using existing product data (e.g., warranty) and a broader set of matrices to a greater extent. The use of analytical techniques in conjunction with QFD (e.g., simulation, design of experiments, regression, mathematical target setting, and analytic hierarchy process) was not wide spread in either country. U.S. companies were more likely to report benefits of QFD in improving cross-functional integration and better decision-making processes compared to Japanese companies. Possible reasons for these cross-national differences as well as their implications are discussed.