Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an approach to guide the design, creation and marketing

of goods and services by integrating the voice of the customer into all decisions
QFD focuses on turning the voice of the customer into specific technical requirements that
characterize a design and provide the “blueprint” for manufacturing or service delivery
The process is initiated with a matrix, which because of its structure is often called the House of
Quality
Building a House of Quality begins by identifying the voice of the customer and technical features
of the design. The roof of the House of Quality shoes the interrelationships between any pair of
technical features and these relationships help in answering questions such as “How does a change
in one product characteristic affect others?” Next, a relationship matrix between the customer
requirements and the technical features is developed
The next step is to add market evaluation and key selling points. Next, technical features of
competitive products are evaluated and targets are developed. The final step is to select technical
features that have a strong relationship to customer needs, have poor competitive performance or
are strong selling points. Those characteristics will need to be “deployed” or translated into the
language of each function in the design and process so that proper actions and controls are taken
to ensure that the voice of the customer is maintained
DESIGNING MANFACTURED GOODS
TAGUCHI LOSS FUNCTION
The Taguchi loss function is a reaction to the goal-post model of conforming to specifications.
Taguchi’s approach assumes that the smaller the variation about the nominal specification, the
better the quality is. In turn, products are more consistent and total costs are less. Taguchi
measured quality as the variation from the target value of a design specification and then
translated that variation into an economic “loss function” that expresses the cost of variation in
monetary terms. The loss function is represented by

Reliability is the probability that a manufactured good, piece of equipment or system performs its
intended function for a stated period of time under specified operating conditions. Many goods are
configured using a series of components, parallel (redundant) components or a combination of
these.

One way to improve reliability during design is to anticipate any product failures that may occur
and then design the product to prevent such failures. Another useful approach is Design for
Manufacturability (DFM), which is intended to prevent product designs that simplify assembly
operations but require more complex and expensive components, designs that simplify component
manufacture while complicating the assembly process and designs that are simple and inexpensive
to produce but difficult or expensive to service or support
Sustainability concerns are being addressed through approaches called Design for Environment
(DfE), which often includes designing goods that can be repaired or recycled