House of Quality
Encyclopedia
Customer
A customer is usually used to refer to a current or potential buyer or user of the products of an individual or organization, called the supplier, seller, or vendor. This is typically through purchasing or renting goods or services...
desires and the firm/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment
Quality function deployment
Quality function deployment is a “method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process.”, as...
(QFD) and it utilizes a planning
Planning
Planning in organizations and public policy is both the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired goal on some scale. As such, it is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior...
matrix
Matrix (mathematics)
In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers, symbols, or expressions. The individual items in a matrix are called its elements or entries. An example of a matrix with six elements isMatrices of the same size can be added or subtracted element by element...
to relate what the customer wants to how a firm (that produces the products) is going to meet those wants. It looks like a House with a "correlation matrix" as its roof, customer wants versus product features as the main part, competitor evaluation as the porch etc. It is based on "the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers' desires and tastes". It also is reported to increase cross functional integration within organizations using it, especially between marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
, engineering and manufacturing.
The basic structure is a table with "Whats" as the labels on the left and "Hows" across the top. The roof is a diagonal matrix of "Hows vs. Hows" and the body of the house is a matrix of "Whats vs. Hows". Both of these matrices are filled with indicators of whether the interaction of the specific item is a strong positive, a strong negative, or somewhere in between. Additional annexes on the right side and bottom hold the "Whys" (market research, etc.) and the "How Muches". Rankings based on the Whys and the correlations can be used to calculate priorities for the Hows.
House of Quality analysis can also be cascaded, with "Hows" from one level becoming the "Whats" of a lower level; as this progresses the decisions get closer to the engineering/manufacturing details.
A Flash tutorial exists showing the build process of the traditional QFD "House of Quality" (HOQ). There are also free House of Quality templates available that walk users through the process of creating a House of Quality.