Quality Function Deployment: Designing Products to Meet Customer Expectations

Quality Function Deployment is an approach used to define consumers’ needs and translate them into particular plans to create brands that could meet the same needs. Particularly, quality must be established into any product to meet the requirements expected of customers by offering superior value items. The voice of the customer (VOC) describes both the unstated and stated needs of consumers. Various methods can be used to capture the customers’ insights: Interviews, reports, surveys, discussions, observation, customer specifications, and many more. The product planning matrix, also known as the house of quality, is used to translate them into technical characteristics to meet the needs of consumers. Thus, in this discussion, a summary of the importance of QFD to the product design process and marketing strategy development is presented. Creating a QFD for Mercedes and incorporating the Fitness to Latent Requirement further enables the discussion of the determination of customer needs. QFD is helpful in building VOC to improve Customer’s experience (CX) while using five robust finesses; therefore, establishing a competitive advantage, and resulting in a return on investment (ROI). 

Importance of QFD to the Product Design Process and Marketing Strategy Development and Determination of Customer Needs 

QFD can help in integrating customers’ expectations into decision making. Collecting the voice of customers can be very useful if done at the right time and the right channel is used to obtain the goals ( Aminuddin Yusof, 2017) . Therefore, to avoid program failure, it is crucial to use the right personnel to collect data. If done correctly, QFD will help in establishing the needs of every consumer; thus, the urge to improve the brand output. The whole production process depends on what the client expects; therefore, it is proper to design products depending on what consumers can buy. 

QFD is a recipe for making improvements in the firm. Actions could be taken depending on the information collected from customers ( Kuo & Chen, 2011) . The five key stages should be used to ensure that the VOC is integrated properly to help improve output: Define, design, listen, analyze, and then act. The last bit stresses on the urge to utilize an automated closed-loop system to solve issues arising from targeted consumers. At this point, the responsible person should identify the problem as fast as possible to take appropriate action to resolve arising issues. 

The VOC can be used to fuel innovation in the company. Specifically, the analysis part delves into finding more information about the identified issue to find the best possible solution ( Franceschini, 2016) . Notably, consumers will tend to compare products as produced by different companies. Therefore, to stand out from the rest, creativity and innovation must be a top-notch higher to capture more clients. The focus is on what customers want. To make it more interesting, competitive analysis is crucial as it helps in determining what is already in the market. Then, the adjustment is then done depending on the targeted outcome. 

The use of QFD reduces the development time. There is often a reduction in the design changes since QFD will focus mostly on improving brands to meet the needs of clients ( Atugade et al. , 2016) . As a result, careful attention is focused on clients’ needs to reduce the risk that some changes may occur late in the project cycle. Therefore, no much time is spent on creating less useful functions and features aimed at satisfying the need of customers. 

For success and ROI in a firm, QFD becomes a key component of the development process. Gathering VOC will help the firm sit somewhere above its competitors. While making decisions in the company, the collected facts from the clients can be integrated. As a result, improvements can be realized, innovation and creativity enhanced, and the development time reduced to a considerable duration. Therefore, it is upon the role of the management to define the need to improve the work plan to harness the best out workforce to improve return on investment. 

QFD for Mercedes Incorporating the Fitness to Latent Requirement 

References 

Aminuddin Yusof, J. J., & Shah, P. M. (2017). Customer’s expectation, perception, and satisfaction with the service quality of a fitness center in Malaysia. 

Atugade, U. R., Awate, P. P., Shinde, M. S., & Harugade, N. V. (2016). Quality function deployment. In International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering and Management (pp. 53-57). 

Franceschini, F. (2016). Advanced quality function deployment . CRC Press. 

Kuo, H. M., & Chen, C. W. (2011). Application of quality function deployment to improve the quality of Internet shopping website interface design. International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information, and Control , 7 (1), 253-268.