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Quality Function Deployment in Higher Education Institutes of Pakistan

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DOI: 10.5829/idosi.mejsr.2012.12.8.1639

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Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research 12 (8): 1111-1118, 2012
ISSN 1990-9233
© IDOSI Publications, 2012
DOI: 10.5829/idosi.mejsr.2012.12.8.1639

Quality Function Deployment in Higher Education Institutes of Pakistan

Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Khalid Khan,

Mansoor Nazir Bhatti, Aamir Khan and Khalid Zaman

Department of Management Sciences,

COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

Abstract: Quality of higher education is its ability to produce a steady flow of people with high intelligence
and commitment to learning that will continue the process of transmission and advancement of knowledge.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one of the Total Quality Management (TQM) techniques which can be
applied for process and design improvement. This study uses QFD as a tool for quality improvement and
benchmarking in higher education institutions of Pakistan. The study is based on primary data collected from
five hundred students which is considered as customers and five hundred teachers, considered as technical
describers from six Pakistani national degree awarding universities. A self designed questionnaire was used
for data collection. The data was analyzed using the techniques of QFD on higher education institutes of
Pakistan. On the basis of these feedback, a house of quality is developed, which highlighted the major
concerned areas of quality improvements in teaching and also highlighted some benchmarks where other
institutions are more productive.

Key words: Quality Function Deployment % Higher education % Relationship matrix % House of quality
% Pakistan

INTRODUCTION rest [9, 10]. Educations services are often difficult to

Quality is the most important factor of competition
worldwide and this competition intensified the demand for
quality products and services. To meet these challenges,
many businesses have adopted the strategies of total
quality management (TQM). TQM is effort to achieve
quality organization-wide. TQM refers to managing
quality aspirations which involves every department to
achieve excellence in business, with regard to customer
satisfaction. TQM focuses on the improvement of quality
of products and services in business corporations [1, 2],
organizations of health care [3] and also at government
agencies level [4]. To meet the needs of quality in
education, higher education institutions have also
adopted TQM principles to improve the education quality
[5, 6, 7].
Universities are the main source of provision of
higher education, so they are very concerned about their
quality of services to bring a quality product in market [8].
Universities strive to improve the quality of their
education system which makes them distinctive from the
measure because of they are intangibles, because the
outcome are in the transformation of knowledge in
individuals, change in their characteristics and behavior.
Therefore, there is no mutually accepted definition of
quality which can be applied to the higher education
sector specifically [11].
Further more, in assessing quality of higher
education institutions, issues like autonomy and
independence make complications for the whole process
[12]. In this context, each country has accreditation
agencies that are assessing the quality of education
offered by the higher education institutions by
accrediting and evaluating their degrees and also the
educational work offered by the universities. However,
these agencies have not influenced the quality perception
in the education sector and didn’t clarify the main issues
on the assessment of quality of institutes [13]. Quality in
higher education institutions is not a simple issue [14].
This purpose of the study is to measure the
determinants of service quality within the Higher
Education sector of Khyber Pakhtoonkhawa (KPK)

Corresponding Author: Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS Institute of Information
Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan. E-mail: khalidzaman@ciit.net.pk.
1111
 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 12 (8): 1111-1118, 2012
province of Pakistan. Furthermore, the study focuses on
establishing and testing dimensions to measure
service quality in higher education institutions which
assess the student’s preferences and perceptions
regarding the available educational services. This study
is organized as follows: after introduction in section 1,
literature review is carried out in section 2. Research
methodology is mentioned in section 3. Result and
discussion is provided in section 4. Final section
concludes the study.
Literature Review: The word “Quality” is actually derived
from the Latin word which is “qualis”, means, “what kind
of”. As quality has a variety of connotations and
meanings attached to it that’s why quality is a sort of
difficult term to define. It is usually referred as a “slippery
concept” [15]. The term quality is defined from different
orientations and perspectives, according to the definition
making at individual level, the applied measures and with
reference to the context within which it is taken [16].
Different researchers defined quality differently like,
Peters and Waterman, 1995 defined quality as
“excellence”, according to Feigenbaum, [17], quality is
“value”, Juran and Gryna, [18], defined as “fitness for
use”, according to Crosby, [19], quality is “conformance
to requirements”, “defect avoidance” [20] and [14, defined
quality as “meeting and/or exceeding customers
expectations.
As TQM is currently widely practiced but in fact a
single and a homogenous theory and concept of TQM is
lacking. While in theories, broadly in compliance with one
another, it’s been noted a significant differences do exist.
TQM is of course considered as a tool to underpin the
facilitation of quality. TQM seem to be explained in terms
of the organizational culture to “quality” and further
improvements. From the consumers/users point of view,
defining quality on the basis of product or service is
considered more useful.
However, if we put light on quality from the
perspective of the organization which provides goods or
services, the perspective more relevant to TQM, is
referred to the process-perspective which is more useful.
In quality management, organizations need to have a
proper mechanism to meet customer expectations and
requirements within available resources. The last decade
of the century has observed the increase in acceptance
and utilization of TQM in the services sector [21],
especially considering service quality as an important
factor of growth, organizational survival and success
[22, 23, 24, 25]. Just like quality is difficult to define [26],
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so more complications arise to define the quality in
service sector [27] owing to the properties that
differentiates services from goods. However, when most
of the quality definitions are applied to services sector
usually turn to customer-centered [27], so customer
satisfaction is considered as a function of perceived
quality [23].
A definition for the “quality in education” falls in the
category of the general quality definition. Thus, different
researchers defined the term in their own way like
“excellence in education” by [28]; “value addition in
education” by [17]; “fitness of educational outcome and
experience for use” by [18]; “conformance of education
output to planned goals, specifications and requirements”
by [29, 30]; “defect avoidance in the education process”
by [19]; and “meeting or exceeding customer’s
expectations of education” by [14]. Thus Quality in
Education has variability of concepts and this creates
problem in formulating a single and much comprehensive
definition. According to Sahney et al. [31, p.3], the
definition of TQM in Education as follows:
“Total quality management in education is multi-
faceted. It includes within its ambit the quality of
inputs in the form of students, faculty, support staff
and infrastructure; the quality of processes in the
form of the learning and teaching activity; and the
quality of outputs in the form of the enlightened
students that move out of the system.”
Like in other services sector, education sector
stakeholders consist of students, staff, faculty,
organizations, parents and society - so they all have an
interest to deliver quality of education being by
educational institutions. According to Madu et al. [32]
customers can be classified into input customers,
transformation customers and output customers. So in
education system parents and students can be
categorized as input customers, faculty and staff can be
treated as transformation customers and output
customers are corporations and the society. Customers of
higher education can be classified into two groups i.e.,
primary and secondary groups usually done on the basis
of their locations like internal or external and on the basis
of frequency of interactions between institution and
customers [10]. Educator is the primary internal customer
and the student is considered as the secondary internal
customer. The students are considered as the primary
external customer and their parents as secondary external
customers.
 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 12 (8): 1111-1118, 2012
In appraising the previous studies, higher education
institutions have a number of complementary and also
contradictory “customers”. However it is also essential
that customers should be identified and then processes
be established accordingly in order to find out the specific
needs and also to maintain customer-oriented service
[33, 34]. It is important to identify the customer’s
requirements in order to better satisfy them. The customer
requirements are referred to the expectations made by
customers from an educational system. The design
characteristics are referred as the design elements that
contribute to make a system and then act on or are acted
on by the transformation system. If a higher educational
institution adopts and implements the components/
elements and then designs its system considering these
as bases, the requirements made by various customers
should be met easily and educational system will provide
satisfaction.
The debate on the crucial and important role of
service quality in Higher Education Institutions and its
measurement has been discussed in a number of studies.
A most commonly approach for evaluating quality in
Higher Education Institutions is called quality function
deployment (QFD). QFD is one of the important tool of
total quality management (TQM), which is most often
used for process and design improvement [35, 36, 31].
The main purpose of QFD is to visualize the cause-and-
effect relationships taking a start from the customer needs
and then all the way down till the production process.
Number of reports has documented the benefits and
results gained by adopting TQM principles in many
colleges and universities [36]. QFD is a structured
approach to find out the customer requirements,
specified with products and service design. The benefits
of design are focused on customer requirements,
prioritizing design activities and it also reduces the design
cycle.
QFD is referred as a process which includes (a)
identifying and ranking the relative importance of
customer requirements; (b) identifying design parameters
(or engineering characteristics) that contribute to the
customer requirements; (c) estimating the relationship
between design parameters and customer requirements
and among different design parameters and (d) setting
target values for the design parameters to best satisfy
customer requirements. A QFD matrix which is also called
house of quality is used to help the decision makers to
make the design decisions and predict the right one. QFD
has been successfully used for both product and service
design by many organizations [20, 37, 38].
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[39 examined that how to make students’ evaluations
of teaching more effective. According to the researchers,
they found that students’ evaluation of teaching is
multidimensional, stable, reliable, related with instructors
and unaffected by factors like workload, class size,
module difficulty, etc. Similarly, researchers like [36] have
used the tool of quality function deployment (QFD),
mainly for services sector, to transfer the voice of
customers (students) in stages into operations
requirements. [40] presented a systematic approach for
the courses development process, which focuses mainly
on student satisfaction and learning. The technique QFD
is also used by some other researchers like [41, 42], where
QFD is complemented by Analytical Hierarchical Process
(AHP) for creating priorities after applying “Voices of
Customer” and for each group of customer separately.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a structured
method for listening to the customers and optimizing
designs, materials and processes to ensure the customers’
expectations are best satisfied. Quality function
deployment (QFD) is a method to transform user demands
into design quality, to deploy the functions forming
quality and to deploy methods for achieving the design
quality into subsystems and component parts and
ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing
process, as described by [43]. QFD is designed to help
planners focus on characteristics of a new or existing
product or service from the viewpoints of market
segments, company, or technology-development needs.
The technique yields graphs and matrices. QFD helps
transform customer needs (the voice of the customer
[VOC]) into engineering characteristics (and appropriate
test methods) for a product or service, prioritizing each
product or service characteristic while simultaneously
setting development targets for product or service.
The present study focus the customers demand
(students perceptions about teaching quality) and its
relationship with teachers requirements from the
institution. Data is collected through the feedback of
questionnaire filled by the five hundred students and five
hundred teachers of different universities of Pakistan.
Students requirement are categorized as:
C Knowledge
C Use of instructional material
C Practical skills
C Appreciation
 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 12 (8): 1111-1118, 2012

C Motivation from teacher Table 2: Customer Rating

C Practical experience
C Opportunity
C Self regulated learning
C Feed back
C Teacher personality

While Teachers Requirements are categorized though:

C Knowledge
C Communication skills
C Performance evaluation
C Course Development
C Learning Environment
C Work load
C Encouragement
C Flexible working
C Methodology
C Quality Standards
Table 3: Customer’s Competition
On the basis of students and teachers requirement,
the present study develops a framework of house of
quality.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

The following steps are used to construct house of

quality i.e.,

Table 1: Demanded Quality from Customers

Step 1: Customer Requirement: The first step in QFD is

to analyze the customers and develops the questionnaire
regarding teachers which is considered as a technical
expert and student as customer requirement. Following
information is gathered from the customers by distributing
these questionnaires which shown in QFD matrix 1.

Step 2: Data Gathering from Customers: The

questionnaires were distributed among students from
Engineering and management departments of different
universities. A total of 500 questionnaires were found to
be complete and valid for analysis from the student side.

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 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 12 (8): 1111-1118, 2012

Table 4: Relationship Matrix Symbols Step 3: Sampling Technique: The present study used
convenient sampling technique for data gathering and
collecting response from students as well as teachers of
different departments.

Step 4: Customer Rating: On a scale from 1-10, customers

then rate the importance of each requirement. These
scales will be used later in the relationship matrix,
however, it depicts in Table 2.

Step 5: Customer’s Competition: In the next step of QFD

process, customer rates their competition with the other
universities which are shown in Table 3.

Step 6: Technical Descriptors - "Voice of the Teachers”:

The study further develops the questionnaire for the
technical descriptors to know their needs in order to
measure the quality performance.
Table 5: Correlation matrix scale and symbols used
Description Scales Symbols
Strong positive correlation 0.5--1 ++
Step 7: Data Gathering from Technical Descriptors:
Positive correlation 0--0.5 + The questionnaires were distributed among Faculty.
Negative correlation -0.5--0 - A total of 29 questionnaires were found to be complete
Strong negative correlation -1-- -5 and valid for analysis from the teacher.

Table 6: QFD Matrix for Quality Dimensions

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 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 12 (8): 1111-1118, 2012
Step 8: Relationship Matrix: The study determines the
relationship between the variables on QFD matrix in terms
of symbols which representing scales, then assign signs
to them.
Strong relation
Medium relation
Weak relation
Table 4 shows the symbols for relationship matrix.
Step 9: Organizational Difficulties: Rate the
organizational difficulties that is basically ‘technical
expert’ responses which ranges from 0 to 10.
Step 10: Correlation Matrix: In final step, the study
calculates correlation coefficient between technical
requirements. The description of correlation matrix is
given in Table 5.
The most commonly used categories of ‘strong’,
‘medium', ‘weak’ and no relationship with the values of
9, 3, 1 and 0 respectively were applied. In order to rank the
specified enablers according to students and teachers.
The importance rating given by each group were
considered in the Table 6, the importance rating were
multiplied by weight and accumulated to give an overall
score for each process. The result of the QFD application
shows very high score for 1st enablers; it can be attributed
to the fact that knowledge is the most important aspect
from the customer point of view for each process.
CONCLUSION
QFD is a useful technique for the improvements in
quality in the manufacturing industry; however, it does
not mean that its effectiveness can be neglected in the
service industry as well. Modern research showed its
effectiveness in the service industry. Higher education
institutions have a concern with their quality improvement
and these institutions are continuously looking new
methodologies for the betterment of their teaching quality.
The present study used QFD as a tool for improvement of
teaching quality and also for the Benchmarking to
improve their overall quality. QFD assessment showed the
comparison of different universities in certain areas of
their quality teaching. Result shows the area in which a
university is performing best, so other universities can
use this performance as a benchmark for their
improvement in certain area.
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