Advanced QFD Applications

Citation

Raouf, A. (2004), "Advanced QFD Applications", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 76-76. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552510410526901

Quality function deployment (QFD) is considered to be a systematic process for motivating a business to focus on its customers. It is used by cross functional teams to identify and resolve issues involved in producing products, processes, services, and strategies which will more than satisfy their customers. It is often said that tomorrow's most successful companies must understand customers' needs better than the customers do.

QFD applications are well documented in the literature. However, it is rare that one comes across quantitative and qualitative analysis of QFD data. The authors have quite successfully shown QFD analysis to maximize its potential to practical applications.

The book has nine chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 provides QFD's background and a basic introduction to QFD. Voice of customer (VOC) is described in Chapter 3. This includes use of VOC, forecasting method and fuzzy logic analysis. Chapter 4 addresses the issue of variability analysis in QFD and provides examples. Prioritization and decision making using QFD is the subject of Chapter 5. Benchmarking for quality improvement is covered in Chapter 6. Prioritization of customer satisfaction, along with an integration process model is the topic of Chapter 7. Service quality analysis and QFD are discussed is Chapter 8. Chapter 9 addresses some advanced QFD implementation issues.

The book is very well written. Each chapter contains applications. It is suitable as a reference book for practitioners, students of business and engineering. This book is an example of exceedingly well contribution to QFD literature.