Service Operation Management Ashim Abhinav Ekka
Assignment 14133

HOUSE OF QUALITY

House of Quality is a diagram, resembling a house used for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix 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, engineering and manufacturing. QFD is a tool for translating customer requirements into company requirements and identifying features or capabilities required to become a best-in-class provider. Today, customers are demanding ever-more-challenging levels of quality. A customer lost due to poor quality may never return, and, even worse, may take several potential customers with it. For electronics manufacturing, in which M&As are routine and capital investment is increasing, a reasonable return on investment can be achieved only by being a superior supplier. One must understand the difference between value and price. With competition growing, it is easier to become profitable through better value than by having the lowest price. QFD enables the preservation and use of knowledge through detailed thinking and graphical representation. This representation is known as the “House of Quality, and contributes to improved customer satisfaction, methodical decision-making, and prioritization of customer requirements. The bottom line: improved quality reduced cost, increased responsiveness.

The Rooms The first major room is comprised of a relationship matrix between a customer’s requirements and the supplier’s ability (via product features) to meet those requirements. The requirements have been prioritized according to the customer’s perspective. The relationship can be graded as strong, moderate, or weak, represented by three symbols (points), a double circle (9), a single circle (3), or a triangle (1), respectively. The intent here is to ensure that all critical customer requirements have a strong connection to a feature or ability provided by the manufacturer. It is also intended to find out if a company is providing unnecessary features or services.

Fig. The house of quality The next room is the customer rating of suppliers’ products or services. Here management must decide whether to compare the company’s products or services with a typical competitor or the best two competitors, using the perspective of the customer. One should not be intimidated by the sheer size of the competition. The purpose here is merely to select the top two competitors, then rank their performance against yours based on the customer’s’ requirements. This helps to identify which requirements need more attention or resources to gain a competitive edge. This customer rating information can be collected from customers. Just ask them. The third room in our house is the competitive technical ability matrix, which rates your company’s technical ability in meeting customer requirements against the leading competitor’s. This information can typically be gathered from vendors, as they work with many companies in the same industry. The technical ability matrix helps identify what additional resources are needed to ensure high customer satisfaction in meeting customers’ critical requirements, and it helps to prioritize your company’s resources effectively to optimize ROI. The next room is for measuring the field performance of your product or service. Based on field performance, some adjustments must be made to make the product or service best-in-class. The final room identifies necessary internal controls required to ensure consistent delivery of best-in-class products and features to delight the customers. All this analysis is then summarized to prioritize opportunities for improvement based on the customers’ perspective and to allocate your resources to achieve the best results. There are several other steps to implementing the QFD methodology; however, this first step will certainly get you on your way.

Typical Uses It is best to use house of quality matrix when you are planning on making improvements to an existing product or would like to analyze a products ability to meet customer needs and compare to competition.