

In contrast, Toyota improved its rust prevention record from one of the worst in the world to one of the best by coordinating design and production decisions to focus on this customer concern. Even if the system were to last a lifetime, would it satisfy customers? But it also guaranteed that women in skirts could not get in and out gracefully. Placing it on the left between the seat and the door solved an engineering problem. But if top management could get marketing, designing, and manufacturing executives to sit down together, what should these people talk about? How could they get their meeting off the ground? This is where the house of quality comes in.Ĭonsider the location of an emergency brake lever in one American sporty car. Top executives are learning that the use of interfunctional teams benefits design. But usually, managerial functions remain disconnected, producing a costly and demoralizing environment in which product quality and the quality of the production process itself suffer. Customer surveys will find their way onto designers’ desks, and R&D plans reach manufacturing engineers. Marketing people have their domain, engineers theirs. Today’s fiefdoms are mainly inside corporations. As for a production plan, he arose with the cock’s crow to light the forge fire so that it would be hot enough by midday. For strength-who knows why?-he cooled the steel plates in the urine of a black goat. Then the armorer would design the production process. The two might discuss the material-plate rather than chain armor-and details like fluted surfaces for greater bending strength. If a knight wanted armor, he talked directly to the armorer, who translated the knight’s desires into a product.

Marketing, engineering, and manufacturing were integrated-in the same individual. It means that companies learn from customer experience and reconcile what they want with what engineers can reasonably build.īefore the industrial revolution, producers were close to their customers. 1 Strategic quality management means more than avoiding repairs for consumers. What’s So Hard About Designĭavid Garvin points out that there are many dimensions to what a consumer means by quality and that it is a major challenge to design products that satisfy all of these at once. People with different problems and responsibilities can thrash out design priorities while referring to patterns of evidence on the house’s grid. The house of quality is a kind of conceptual map that provides the means for interfunctional planning and communications. The foundation of the house of quality is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers’ desires and tastes-so marketing people, design engineers, and manufacturing staff must work closely together from the time a product is first conceived. Japanese designers use it for services like swimming schools and retail outlets and even for planning apartment layouts.Ī set of planning and communication routines, quality function deployment focuses and coordinates skills within an organization, first to design, then to manufacture and market goods that customers want to purchase and will continue to purchase. The house of quality has been used successfully by Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics, home appliances, clothing, integrated circuits, synthetic rubber, construction equipment, and agricultural engines. Toyota and its suppliers then developed it in numerous ways. The “house of quality,” the basic design tool of the management approach known as quality function deployment (QFD), originated in 1972 at Mitsubishi’s Kobe shipyard site. Ford and General Motors use it-at Ford alone there are more than 50 applications. Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, and ITT are getting started with it.
