Practical Application For Designing Quality House (Case Study)

Quality Function Deployment (QFD), as came in definition ,is a systematic thinking process for product planning that enables businesses to consider the characteristics of product to ensure that products satisfy customer requirements for it is a customer – driven quality management and product development system for achieving higher customer satisfaction . (QFD) has become a widely used tool in the product development process. It helps design teams gather the wants and needs of the customer and organize and utilize this data so that a product which satisfies the customer will be developed. It addresses dimensions including customer desire, quality characteristics, functions, parts, and failure modes. One of the reasons for the success and acceptance of QFD is that it is a very versatile tool. The traditional matrices and process can be modified in many different ways to fit the needs of the product team. Like any innovation, however, QFD in practice has been implemented with varying degrees of success. QFD is a system engineering process, which can be applied to large systems. It can be extended to a project functions, project phases, project resource utilization, and other areas such education. QFD utilizes the house of quality (HOQ) as a method of understanding customer requirements, establishing the priorities of design requirements, and product segmentation and positioning. The research presents how to build the house of quality through a real case study. The aim of this research is emphasis that such techniques should be strongly considered for inclusion in any Total Quality Management effort and specially can be applied to practically any manufacturing or service industry. So we applied the new techniques even in representing the House of Quality matrix by using Auto Cad program. that we consider an electrical motor (1/4 HP) in our case study because of its wide use, especially at summer season in the air coolers, by consulting the specialists from engineers and technicians especially in our field “ Mechanical Engineering ” as well as consumers by the huge field study in industry as well as markets with focusing on some main customer requirements, then comparing our results with other foreign products. In short the organizations should recognize such tools and techniques in the context of total Quality Management in order to increase the knowledge and personal efficiency. as we concluded in our case study by taking many different variables.

PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.comOver the past few years, two issues have become mantras for corporations throughout the world: "mass customization "and "meeting or exceeding the customer's needs ".Companies have rushed to offer a range of products that covered almost every configuration their target market might want.However, as the number of products being offered by companies grew larger, it became evident that the cost estimates used to determine the profitability of these new product offerings did not fully account for all the costs associated with providing this variety.Increased inventories above what was expected, additional setups, and the complexity of managing the increased variety were not always included in the original cost estimates, and the expected profits did not follow because of these factors.These additional cost drivers were not included because of the difficulty in estimating their effects.[6] (QFD) is a method that uses matrices to show the relationship between two or more sets of concepts A simplified matrix for interaction between potential customer needs and engineering design elements has been termed the house of quality (HOQ).QFD utilizes the HOQ as a construct for understanding customer requirements and prioritizing design requirements.The HOQ aims to design a product or modify a product design so as to meet or exceed customer expectations.[5] This matrix is especially powerful because of the amount of information that can be documented and analyzed.It requires that the team ask specific questions about customer needs, competitors, and how their organization will meet the challenges of providing products that delight the customer.[2] (QFD) is a widely used Industrial Engineering technique for systematically focusing on customers' requirements.Usually, cross-functional teams within the business use it to identify and resolve issues involved in product development, process control, services, etc.Here, we introduce its first step, which is called the "House of Quality".It organizes important activities and information (Figure 1).The six components are: 1. Customer Requirements: A structured list of customer requirements for a product, usually described in their words (also called Voice of Customer).

Case Study
The initial steps in forming the House of Quality include determining, clarifying, and specifying the customers' needs.These steps lay the foundation for a clearly defined venture and will ensure a project or process is well thought out prior to any further development.In our case study we consider an electrical motor (1/4HP) , because of its wide use, especially at summer season in the air coolers , while the company produce other motor types(1/2HP,1HP).
As mechanical engineers we focused basically on some features such as (wire type, Horse power, Manufacturing of stator ,the ball bearing and screws features ,Manufacturing of covers,……cost,etc.) because of their importance in our field.
Past In our case study the customer requirements were put according to the usage of the device in the best way.
These parameters can be derived from several locations.Organizations can use known data from market research, or conduct new studies to gather necessary information.In any event, the needs, which were clarified and then explicitly stated, should be satisfied to the best of that organization's ability.as shown in fig.(4).

2-Customer Importance Ratingslanning Matrix
The next step in the QFD process is forming a planning matrix.The main purpose of the planning matrix is to compare how well the team met the customer requirements compared to its competitors.The planning matrix shows the weighted importance of each requirement that the team and its competitors are attempting to fulfill.Customer ratings, typically ranging from 1 to 5, are given to each company under each requirement.As in Fig. (

4-Project Objectives
This step shows what requirements should be developed according to customer needs and the other companies products , as shown in the table below The attributes got these values because they are lesser the competitor's product values so we had to improve them to these values, while the other attributes ( fits over different sizes, finishing) stayed as they were because they didn 't need improvement.These target values are shown in Fig. (7).According to get the Improvement Rate we can use the following equation: Improvement Rate = Target value / Evaluation score ……(1) By applying the above equation using Fig.

(7) we get the results in table (2)
After getting these results the QFD team can make the right decisions to improve and develop the attributes.
Then we have to find the (weight) or the importance of each attribute or costumer requirement by using the following equation: Weight = Improvement rate * the relevant importance weight factor ……(2) by applying this equation we could find the weight for each attribute as following: Easy to fix: 2 * 3= 6 Low noise and vibration:1.7 * 5 = 8.5 Etc. as shown in Fig. (8).The sum of the weights is 51.7, so we can find the percentage of weight for each attribute, taking the example below: (Weight %) for (Easy to fix) attribute = 6*100/51.7=12% ……………etc.

5-Technical parameters (voice of engineer)
In this step the QFD team of the company should put the main technical requirements for this product that would be interrelated with the customer requirements in the matrix.These requirement are displayed in Fig. (9).below.
3-Direction of Improvement As the team defines the technical descriptors, a determination must be made as to the direction of movement for each descriptor to state if it has to be improved in which way as shown in Fig.( 10) by arrows.

6-Interrelation matrix InMatrix
The main function of the interrelationship matrix is to establish a connection between the customer 's product requirements and the performance measures designed to improve the product.With this customer overview, the company can begin to formulate a strategy to improve their product.In doing this, the strengths and weaknesses of the company are weighted against the customer priorities to determine what PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.comKnowing what improvements need to be made allows the list of performance measures to be generated and displayed across the top of the interrelationship matrix.By definition, a performance measure is a technical measure evaluating the product's performance of a demanded quality.In other words, the company must take the voice of the customer and translate it into engineering terms.The matrix will have At least one performance measure for each demanded quality.
After setting up the basic matrix, it is necessary to assign relationships between the customer requirements and the performance measures.These relationships are portrayed by symbols indicating a strong relationship, a medium relationship, or a weak relationship.The symbols in turn are assigned respective indexes such as 9-3-1, 4-2-1, or5-3-1.
When no relationship is evident between a pair a zero value is always assigned.T --Strong Relationship = 9 -Medium Relationship = 3 -Weak Relationship = 1 While the empty cell means there is no relationship between the customer need and the product technical requirement.
For example there is strong relationship between the maintainable feature and the manufacturing of covers, while the relationship between the noise and the wire type is weak.
After putting these relationships we can show the importance of the project by points using the following equation with regard of results that we got before from Fig. (8): By applying the above equation on our case study we obtain the points of the matrix's cells: Easy to fix ------------to the manufacturing of stator: 1*12 = 12 Low noise and vibration ------------to the horse power 3*16= 48 Etc. as shown in Fig. (11).
After filling the cells we notice that the sum of points of each requirement could be count easily , as we notice that the points of the horse power(48+12+36+12+12=120),while the sum of all points equals 3382, according to these points we can expect the most important requirements that satisfy the customer , so we can get the percentage of each technical requirement (21% for manufacturing of covers ,19% for the ball bearing and screws features) which put them as the most important requirements to deal with in designing this product because they got the highest priority percentage.aswe can see in Fig. (12) 7-Interaction between product specification Performance measures in existing designs often conflict with each other.The technical correlation matrix, which is more often referred to as the Roof, is used to aid in developing relationships between customer requirements and product requirements and identifies where these units must work together PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.comotherwise they will be in a design conflict.The following symbols are used to represent what type of impact each requirement has on the other.These symbols are then entered into the cells where a correlation has been identified.The objective is to highlight any requirements that might be in conflict with each other.as in Fig. (13).
Any cell identified with a high correlation is a strong signal to the team, and especially to the engineers, that significant communication and coordination are a must if any changes are going to be made.Many technical requirements are related to each other so working to improve one may help a related requirement and a positive or beneficial effect can result.On the other hand, working to improve one requirement may negatively affect a related requirement as mentioned above.One of the principal benefits of the Roof is that it flags these negative relationships so they can be resolved.If these issues aren't settled satisfactorily, some aspects of the final product will dissatisfy the customer.icalProperties & Targets The technical properties matrix uses specific items to record the priorities assigned to technical requirements.It also provides a technical performance achieved by competitive products and the degree of difficulty in developing each requirement.The final output of the matrix is a set of target values for each technical requirement to be met by the new design.In some cases, organizations are not able to create the most optimum design because of constraints related to cost, technology, or other related items.

Technical analysis (Setting Design Targets & Benchmarks)
The customer requirements are distributed across the relationships to the quality characteristics.This gives an organization prioritized quality characteristics.High priority quality characteristics usually indicate that working on this technical issue will deliver great value to the customer.A high quality characteristic weight indicates strong relationships with high priority demanded quality items.An organization's current products can be benchmarked technically with competitors' products on the high priority quality characteristics.In many cases, organizations should not be surprised to learn that competitors are better at a given task or characteristic.QFD assists organizations to identify technical areas and to develop areas where they can achieve the most cost effective customer satisfaction.Organizations can then examine the Customer Context for usage concerns that must be accounted for, and set design target specifications for our quality characteristics.At a minimum, current performance standards should be maintained.So we need to put the units, cost , or the type of each requirement so that we can compare it with the competitor's product.with regard our local product wire type is (A) and the competitor's is (B)…etc.As shown in table (3).
So the final form of the house of quality for this case study can be seen in Fig. (14).

Conclusions
In few words QFD is: The voice of the customer translated into the voice of the engineer.
Sometimes importance levels and requirements may mislead the PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.comdesigners if they only listed in a table.Thus, the requirements should be considered as concepts and the relationships between the concepts should be examined visually.Concept mapping provides the tool needed in this situation.Concept mapping can reveal the requirements which are hidden behind the words.As in our case study the engineer or the team of work may pay more attention to some variables more than others such as wire type, or diameter of the wire but the house of quality showed that the more important variables are manufacturing of covers(21%) and the ball bearing features(19%) because they got the highest points and percentage of total as we showed before after taking the customer needs with regard to these technical requirements by the interrelationship between these two variables.
Then comes the importance of cost which took (17%)and this requirement has an important position within the practical thinking in the designing process.and so on till we reach the horse power requirement which took (4%) as importance ,while it took a great attention for the engineers and technicians ,but it did not get this great effect to the customer requirements .
While comparing the local product with the competitors' (Syrian and Persian) we noticed that there are some features needed to be improved such as( easy to fix, low noise and vibration)requirements, some of them are better such as (maintainable , low cost )and the other requirements are most similar in general such as electrical safety, but we proposed that some requirements should be improved to higher values such as (easy to fix, maintainable,…….etc.).
Because of this focus, the process leads to improved customer understanding and the ultimate outcome = a satisfied customer.

Recommendations
As what had been taken in this case study, it can be recommended the following: * We propose to the company to regard our study and the conclusions we got to improve the product in efficiency, maintenance, safety and cost to satisfy the customer's demands.* It is strongly needed for using the house of quality in the institutes specially the ones that are dealing with the customers directly.* Take other variables and more technical requirements for the same product or any others.* The House of Quality functions as a living document and a source of ready reference for related products and future upgrades.While it is a great communication tool at each step in the process, the matrices are the means and not the end.Its purpose is to serve as a vehicle for dialogue to strengthen vertical and horizontal communications.Through customer needs and competitive analysis, the House of Quality helps to identify the critical technical components that require change.Issues are addressed that may never have surfaced before.These critical issues are then driven through the other matrices to identify the critical parts, manufacturing operations, and quality control measures needed to produce a product that fulfills both customer needs and producer needs within a shorter development cycle time.
* The house of quality can be applied to different multiple issues other than PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com

Fig
their perceptions of the performance of existing products.These priorities can be adjusted based on the issues that the design team identifies.Fig. (1-b) 3. Technical Requirements: A set of engineering characteristics to meet the customer needs.It describes the product in the terms of the company (thus called the Voice of the Company).Fig. (1-c) 4. Interrelationships matrix: A matrix that relates customer requirements and technical requirements to identify issues, and group these issues into different sectors according to their importance and priorities.Fig. (1-d) 5. Roof: A display of where the technical requirements that characterize the product support or impede one another, Considers impact of technical requirements on each other, and make Feature to feature comparison.Fig.(1-e) 6. Targets: A summary of the conclusions drawn from the data contained in the entire matrix and the team's discussions.Fig.
aspects need to be changed to surpass the competition, what aspects need to change to equal the competition, and what aspects will be left unchanged.The optimal combination is desired.