QUALITY FUNCTION DEVELOPMENT: (QDF)
It is the process of designing the products according to the needs and wants of the target market (customers). To perform this process, Multi-skills teams collaborate to understand the appropriate needs and desires of the customers. This process generates lots of benefits in the organization along with some disadvantages in it. This technique is being followed by many companies who want to retain its customers for a long time period (Schroeder, Goldstein, and Rungtusanatham, 2012).
Benefits of Quality Function Development on the overall organizational process:
Some of the benefits associated with Quality Function Development are as follow (Krajewski, Ritzman, &Malhorta, 2007):
- It improves the process of communication and sharing of information among the entire cross functional teams which are responsible in the development of a new product. The team is based on the employees from different functional groups.
- This approach allows the organization to confine and present an extensive variety of imperative design information in one place in a compacted form.
- It gives a great support for understanding, concurrence and decisions making particularly when multifaceted relationships and trade-offs are concerned.
- The formation of an informational foundation which is important for repetitive cycles of product enhancements.
- Better probability of the success of product in the marketplace, due to the specifically targeting of identified needs or requirements of customer.
- Reduction in the overall time of designing the product, majorly due to a cutback in time-consuming changes in design of product.
- The reduction in the design changes results in reducing the overall cost of production, which is not only costly but time consuming as well.
- It reduced the cost of product by elimination of the not needed product features along with rejected designs by customers.
- The designed product according to the needs and wants of the customers increased the level of satisfaction of customers.
- It sets the standards for the production process and then evaluation takes place to find out the deviation in the process by comparing it with set standards. This sets the platform to determine the problems and make corrective measures at the initial stage to solve the problem with minimum loss.
Drawbacks of implementing QFD to product design:
Some of the drawbacks associated with Quality Function Development are as follow Apte, Maglaras, and Pinedo, 2008):
- The perceptions of the customers are identified by the market research and market surveys. If the survey has been conducted in a poor way and generates inaccurate consequences then the overall analysis might results in doing damage to the company.
- It is a more time consuming process then general design process along with more costly in data storage, data manipulation and data maintenance.
- It is highly dependent on the requirements of customers and it is inflexible to changing necessities, must recalculate or redesign.
- The needs and wants of the customers are changing quickly with the change in fashion and trends. So it is difficult to analyze the changing behavior of customers. Therefore, a comprehensive system and systematic judgment can make adapting to change the needs of market more complex.
- Like other Japanese management techniques, some troubles can come about when QFD is applied to the western business environment and culture.
References
Apte, U., Maglaras, C. and Pinedo, M. (2008). ‘Operations in the Service Industries: Introduction to the Special Issue’. Production and Operations Management, 17( 2), 235–237
Krajewski, L.J., Ritzman, L.P., &Malhorta, M.K. (2007).Operations management: processes and value chains. New Jersey, USA: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Schroeder, R., Goldstein, S., and Rungtusanatham, M. (2012). Operations management in the supply chain: decisions and cases. New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin
