House of Quality (QFD) in a Minute, Second Edition

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an effective tool to help organizations become more competitive by designing their products and services to satisfy customers' requirements. This book is precise and direct and focuses on the key issues in building the House of Quality otherwise known as QFD. By reading this book, the manager understands how to solicit customer requirement information, how design requirements are matched, how priorities are developed, and how activities can be benchmarked. The manager also understands how to solve critical problems that help achieve customer satisfaction.

The book also guides the reader to understand how companywide quality activities are related to QFD. This link is often lacking in other presentations of QFD that often fail to show the linkage between QFD and other quality initiatives and management programs. Specifically, this book relates QFD to other quality initiatives such as

Benchmarking
Strategic planning
Quality control charts
Stakeholder teams
Concurrent engineering
Cost control and productivity improvement
Six sigma

The 2nd edition of this book has expanded on the gains made in the 1st edition by including an important chapter on Six Sigma and QFD. In addition, short cases on QFD, and test questions are presented at the end of each chapter.

Like the 1st edition, this book is written with the reader in mind to provide a simple and quick understanding of this important technique. The book can be used as a quick reference guide by anyone involved in quality management and deployment. Consultants, managers, practitioners, and engineers in both the public and private sectors irrespective of whether they are involved in manufacturing or service operations, will find this book very useful. Students and instructors of quality management will also continue to find this book very useful.

Christian N Madu is Research Professor of management science at the Lubin School of Business, Pace University, New York. He is also co-editor of the International Journal of Quality and Reliability Management.