[SysOp note: No figures or graphics were included in the electronic form of this article. Tom Glenn, the TQM BBS (310-686-1164).] ----------------------------------------------------Business Index & ASAP------ AUTHOR(s): Maddux, Gary A. Amos, Richard W. Wyskida, Alan R. TITLE(s): Organizations can apply quality function deployment as strategic planning tool. (total quality management) illustration chart Summary: Total quality management (TQM) introduced many new management tools to the US Department of Defense, including quality function deployment (QFD). QFD is a technique for designing a product for manufacture, originally developed in Japan's automobile and shipbuilding industries. QFD is also a successful strategic planning tool for planning programs or activities. The technique's primary objectives are to identify the customer, his needs and how to fulfill those needs. The use of the QFD technique is illustrated through the formulation of a strategy for implementing and managing a program for the Production Engineering Division of the US Army Missile command. Industrial Engineering p33(5) Sept 1991 v23 n9 DESCRIPTORS: Strategic Planning Management Applications United States. Department of Defense Management Science Quality Control Management science_Planning FILM NUMBER: 60Y 1606 One tool receiving notice as a result of the shift toward a TQM philosophy is quality function deployment (QFD). Used originally in the shipbuilding and automobile industries of Japan, QFD is primarily a technique for designing a product for manufacture, according to John Hauser and Don Clausing. However, QFD can also be successfully applied as a strategic planning tool for the design of an intangible product such as a program or activity. While there is no industry standard guiding the use of QFD, Louis Cohen chronicles a methodology for its utilization. QFD fundamentals QFD can be defined as "a system for designing a product or service based on customer demands and involving all members of the producer or supplier organization," said Bob King. L.P. Sullivan says QFD translates the customer's requirements into the appropriate technical requirements for each stage in the product's development and production cycle. It enables organizations to be proactive rather than reactive in quality control, according to Shigeru Mizuno. It offers a structured method to utilize the collective knowledge of management in defining the most critical characteristics of a product. A cross-functional team of personnel is brought together to channel thoughts and perceptions by brainstorming. QFD's three fundamental objectives are to identify: 1) the customer, 2) what the customer wants, 3) how to fulfill the customer's wants. The first step of a QFD exercise is to objectively determine what group or groups constitute the customer base. For the design engineer, this equates to answering the question, "Who will benefit from the successful production or implementation of this product or program?" Once the customers have been identified, the wants of each customer or customer group must be determined. In QFD terminology, these are commonly referred to as the WHATs (i.e. What does the customer want?). These WHATs can be ascertained by either asking representatives of the customer group, through survey, questionnaire, or interview, or through the knowledge and judgment of the QFD team participants. As stated by Robert Hall in his book, Attaining Manufacturing Excellence, design engineers are greatly maligned for concentrating so much on the technical aspects of design, yet giving so little thought to how everything fits together. Through the structured QFD process, these engineers are forced to first consider what the customer wants, then the means of achieving that end. When defining the WHATs in a QFD exercise, Gary Vasilash notes it is important to use the same terms and phrases as would the customer. The best way to do this is through the interview/questionnaire process. As is often the case, time and budgetary constraints may prevent this approach. However, the QFD team must be able to empathize with the customer so as to correctly identify what the customer demands of the product. Next, the QFD team must determine a means by which to satisfy these WHATs. In QFD terminology, these will be the "HOWs," and will consist of the items or attributes of the product or program under development. When formulating a program strategy, the HOWs will constitute many of the action agendas in the strategic plan. The WHATs and HOWs are now ready for entry into the QFD matrix. This matrix (Figure 1), often referred to as an A-1 quality table, is a simple table of rows, in which the WHATs are recorded, and columns, used to record the HOWs, according to King. After meeting the three objectives, QFD transitions from a qualitative to a quantitative methodology. The QFD team assigns numeric values of 1.5, 1.2, and 1.0 to each of the WHATs, with 1.5 going to the most important WHAT, 1.2 to the second most, and 1.0 to all others. These values are referred to as the sales points and reflect the relative importance of these customer demands. The next step is to determine the correlation between each HOW and WHAT in the matrix. The following correlations and values are used: Many cells within the matrix will receive no value, indicating no correlation. Each WHAT must also be analyzed and assigned a value from 1 (for relatively low importance) to 5 (for high importance). These values should be recorded within the QFD matrix in the "rate of importance" column (Figure 2). Next, an objective evaluation should be made of the current performance of the organization in meeting each WHAT, and a realistic expectation as to where the organization will be in a given period of time. The ratings range from 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good). These values are recorded in the QFD matrix under the headings of "company now" and plan," respectively. The final steps are a basic task of number crunching. The "ratio of improvement" should be calculated by dividing each WHAT'S "company now" score into its "plan" score. The absolute weight of each WHAT is then calculated as follows: Once all WHATs have been similarly calculated, the demanded weight is computed by normalizing the column of absolute weights. The WHATs with the largest demanded weights represent the most critical customer demands. A similar exercise yields the corresponding critical HOWs. In order to quantify the HOWs, the demanded weights of each corresponding WHAT is multiplied by the correlation factor previously recorded in the cells of the matrix. By summing the columns, and again normalizing the sums of all columns, the most significant HOWs are derived. Though mechanics of QFD are reasonably simple, its application enforces a rigor of planning and detail from its users. Participants in a QFD exercise must be capable of viewing the product from the vantage point of the customer. In order to do this, it is often advantageous to personalize the exercise by imaging yourself as a particular person within the customer group, then answering the question, "What do I want?" as you feel that customer would. Using QFD In order to better illustrate the use of QFD as a strategic planning tool, we will relate our experience in a recent exercise. The Production Engineering Division (PED) of the U. S. Army Missile Command (MICOM) is formulating a strategy to successfully implement and manage a program called Production Engineering (PE) Tools. PE Tools has a four-fold objective: 1) Establish a single Army-wide center for the integration and dissemination of tools to support the concurrent engineering process. 2) Develop and validate analytical tools which increase the quality and quantity of information available to Support the development of Army systems. 3) Reduce the time and effort required to develop and transition Army systems into production. 4) Broaden the industrial base by providing the ability to rapidly produce critical items for test, evaluation, and fielding. The intent is to either locate or develop software or other tools related to the production function, evaluate its effectiveness and utility to other groups, then promote the transfer of this technology throughout the Department of Defense (DoD). The result desired is a more efficient and cost effective means for all organizations involved in the production process to share their collective knowledge and resources. Upon the formation of the QFD team, the initial brainstorming session involved identifying the customers of the product. For PE Tools, there were three customers considered: the internal staff of production engineers at MICOM, production engineering organizations at other Major Subordinate Commands (MSCs), and the Production Management Group of the Army Materiel Command (AMC). The engineers at MICOM were viewed as representative of all engineers within other MSCs who were involved in the design, development, and production of weapons' systems and related components. Primary among the concerns of these customers were: * Ease of use * Initial sales point * Benefits to the user * Training * Operating environment * Deliverables The only additional need by engineers within the other MSCs was the technology transfer mechanism, which would determine the means of physically transferring the software or other tool to the end-user. The third customer group was the AMC. While AMC is concerned with the effective and efficient completion of production engineering duties, its scope is broader. Chief among the perceived program demands at AMC were: * Process improvement * Support Army streamlined acquisition process (ASAP) * Utility to multiple organizations * Broadens industrial base * Visibility The view of the QFD team reflected AMC's involvement in conducting activities that could be more globally applicable to the DoD and the United States' public- and private-sector industrial base. The semi-structured brainstorming sessions that generated the above listings went through several iterations before cohesive lists were generated. Most QFD team meetings require several hours in isolation in order for the process to achieve the desired result. The team requires the use of some technique which allows the grouping and regrouping of thoughts in such a way as to lend themselves to appropriate arrangement. Often several ideas will be brought under a more logical subheading, an occurrence which usually simplifies the process. With the customers and their needs defined, the QFD team then defined the quality characteristics, or technical requirements, that would be necessary to successfully meet the three customers' needs. The 20 HOWs developed by the QFD team are shown in Figure 3, recorded across the top of the matrix. Upon reviewing the matrix, there were several terms which needed additional explanation or clarification. This is often the case during a QFD exercise. In order to alleviate this situation within the team, a dictionary of the WHAT and HOW terms used in the exercise was developed. This dictionary was reviewed by all members to verify its accuracy, then used as a point of reference in subsequent discussions. The time required to establish the dictionary can easily be justified when compared to the time saved by not having to redefine terms later in the proceedings. Sales points With all the WHATs and HOWs defined and recorded in the matrix, the team attempted to determine the most important sales points. In this exercise, visibility" was determined to be the most important, thus getting a weight of 1.5, while "process improvement" and "benefits to user" each received weights of 1.2. Specifically, PE Tools should not only be a benefit to those engineers receiving the transferred technologies, but it should also benefit AMC by providing a means to maximize efforts to create a synergy of efforts throughout the Army and DoD. Further, this synergy is a direct example of how more "bang for the buck" can be achieved by working smarter, sharing resources (leveraging), and passing the savings and technologies along to other public- and private-sector organizations. Each WHAT was then analyzed to determine how well PED perceived the problem now, and how well it realistically expected to do a year from now. For example, PED ranked itself as doing an insufficient job currently at the characteristic of visibility, but felt within a year this could be improved to average, a threefold increase. Thus, the ratio of improvement for visibility became three. The team also evaluated each WHAT to determine a rate of importance for each. These ranged from one for "support ASAP" to five for "tech transfer mechanism." Next, the absolute weight for each WHAT is computed by multiplying the rate of importance, the rate of improvement, and the sales point for each. The absolute weights are summed, then normalized to 100. Figure 3 shows that the most critical customer requirements include visibility, technology transfer mechanism, benefits to the user, and deliverables. Therefore, these four areas will be the defining quality characteristics in managing the PE Tools program. Each intersecting cell within the matrix must now be evaluated to determine the correlation between each WHAT and HOW. A strong correlation receives a nine, some correlation a three, and possible correlation a one. (These correlations may be recorded using symbols rather than numbers, as illustrated in both Figures 2 and 3.) The number of evaluations made will be the product of the number of columns and rows. In the PE Tools example, this equates to 260 evaluations (20 HOWs x 13 WHATs). After each correlation has been established, the evaluation factor (9, 3, or 1) will be multiplied by its corresponding demanded weight. This number is recorded in the lower portion of the cell. Each column is then totaled, with those sums being normalized to 100. Again, these results are reflected in Figure 3. More coherent Based on the results of the QFD exercise, PED management can now develop a more coherent strategy for implementing the PE Tools program. As Dr. W. Edwards Deming has taught us, there are both external and internal customers to any process, program, or activity. Using QFD, both sets of customers were identified on the front end of the process. In reviewing the findings of this exercise, three groups of customers, along with their primary wants and needs, were ascertained in such a way as to determine how a change in strategy will affect each. The steps for improving the PE Tools program can also be outlined by analyzing the HOWs within the matrix. By emphasizing proven results in Army programs, demonstrating the capabilities of a given tool, and managing the publicity released concerning a tool, PED management can enhance the opportunity for PE Tools to be successfully transferred to other organizations and provide beneficial results to all participants. Historically used to plan and design a component for manufacture, QFD can also be used to formulate strategies for the management of programs. It combines the qualitative knowledge of management and customer, and the means to quantify these findings to justify decision making. Of the many new tools currently available to support the decision-making process, QFD may offer the biggest "bang for the buck" of them all. Gary A. Maddux is a senior research associate for the Research Institute at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is co-director of the university's Quality Improvement Techniques Laboratory and is an adjunct instructor of MIS. Alan R. Wyskida is a lead producibility engineer at the U.S. Army Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, AL. He received a B.E. degree in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University, an M.S.E. in industrial and systems engineering from The University of Alabama in Huntsville and is a Ph.D. candidate there. Wyskida is a member of IIE. Richard W. Amos is the supervisor of the producibility engineering analysis group at the U.S. Army Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal. He received a B.E. degree in industrial engineering at Auburn University, an M.S.E. degree in industrial and systems engineering at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and is a Ph.D. candidate there. Amos is a senior member of IIE. For further reading: Cohen, Louis, "Quality Function Deployment: An Application Perspective from Digital Equipment Corporation, " National Productivity Review. Summer, 1988. Hall, Robert W., Attaining Manufacturing Excellence. Dow Jones Irwin, 1987. Hauser, John R. and Don Clausing, "The House of Quality," Harvard Business Review. May-June, 1988. King, Bob, Better Designs in Half the Time. GOAL/QPC, 1989. Mizuno, Shigeru, editor, Management for Quality Improvement: The Seven New QC Tools. Productivity Press. 1988. Sullivan, L.P., Quality Function Deployment," Quality Process. 1988. Vasilash, Gary S., "Hearing the Voice of the Customer," Production. February, 1989. Figuration Omitted.