Strategic use of quality function deployment (QFD) in the construction industry

In order to develop usable products, human needs and requirements have to be taken into consideration. By employing the QFD (Quality Function Deployment) method the human needs are systematically matched with the product characteristics, which can help to improve the product quality. In this paper the use of QFD in the area of usable products is discussed and a case study is presented to improve the supply chain of mazandaran spinning industry. The QFD method was used in the case study to translate the needs of usable yarn in spinning the carpet in the moist climate into product characteristics. The QFD analysis of the usable carpet revealed that the characteristics of the yarn were receiving the highest overall quality, which means that improving the design of the best quality yarn Proportional of the moist climate for spinning the carpet would lead to higher customer satisfaction. The importance of developing products that meet the customer or human needs is a priority area in the product development process. With knowledge in Selection of raw materials according to weather conditions it is possible to reveal information of the human needs and requirements. However, in the product development process it also is important to match the climate needs with the product characteristics, which can be achieved by using the QFD method. The knowledge of Selection of raw materials according to weather conditions and the use of the QFD method are therefore useful tools in designing high quality products.

O treinamento é relevante na preparação de funcionários. O Desdobramento da Função Qualidade (QFD) tem se mostrado como um método eficaz para traduzir sistematicamente as necessidades dos clientes em especificações de projetos. Esta pesquisa apresenta a utilização do método QFD em uma aplicação de desenvolvimento de projeto de treinamento. Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa realizada em no setor de treinamento de uma empresa de serviços de grande porte. Os resultados obtidos mostram que a utilização do QFD é uma alternativa eficaz para os gestores elaborarem ou melhorarem seus projetos de treinamento.

Purpose – Quality function deployment (QFD) is a method for structured product planning and development that enables a development team to specify clearly the wants and needs of customers. This method has been successfully employed in the construction industry in developed countries. However, the benefits of QFD have not been practically realised in developing countries such as Nigeria. Hence, this research aims to investigate the awareness and effectiveness of QFD as a quality control technique that enhances the satisfaction of clients in terms of quality, cost and project delivery time in design and build projects. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative and quantitative research approach in the form of in-depth telephone interviews and questionnaires was used to obtain the views of construction professionals such as civil engineers, architects, project managers, chief executive officers and trades people involved in design and build projects in the Nigerian construction industry, as well as 50 clients to ascertain the level of satisfaction derived from these design and build projects. Findings – The results of this research are derived from statistical analysis and show that there is currently little awareness of QFD within the Nigerian construction industry or its potential effectiveness in design and build projects. Originality/value – There has been little previous research into the use of QFD in the Nigerian construction industry, hence this paper provides insight but also highlights the need for further research.

ABSTRACTThe potential for improved weapon load outs on advanced aircraft was recognized by the Wright Laboratories, Munitions Division as a key enabling technology for dramatic improvements in the system performance and affordability. The dilemma faced by the Laboratory was the plethora of enabling technologies, and design concepts. Their combinations were staggering. Given recent weapon technology investments and varying strongly held professional opinions on the best aircraft integration approach, the way ahead was not obvious. Over 1000 potentially feasible combinations of options were available.The laboratory was interested in demonstrating feasible technologies to reduce risk and increase the technical readiness of compressed weapons technologies.The overall goal was to increase the sortie effectiveness of small, F‐16 class fighters by over an order of magnitude using new smaller more accurate munitions currently in development. Resources were available for further development of a limited number of compressed weapons technologies and aircraft carriage technologies. The way we chose to rapidly and accurately identify the high payoff concepts was the use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) as a formal systems engineering tool in an Integrated Product Team environment. The use of QFD enabled the IPT to select high payoff technologies based upon “system requirements” and a high degree of professional knowledge and experience. The QFD process enabled us to eliminate biases built in from the different organizational views of the team which was made up of government/industry, weapon/aircraft, primes and suppliers and to identify synergistic concepts worthy of additional design and development.

Quality function deployment (QFD) — A means for developing usable products

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a well-known concept that has proved its applicability in several domains to enhance quality of designing and manufacturing products while reducing design time and cost. The main idea behind QFD is to listen to customers' requirements and translate these needs into design characteristics. In this paper, we provide an analytical approach of the use of QFD in the domain of Web services. Specifically, we are looking on Web service description which is the main artifact that is used to describe Web service quality characteristics and then retrieve those Web services.

This study was initiated to determine how well quality function deployment (QFD) was suited for process characterization. The process chosen on which to test QFD was the mechanical process of flat lapping (flat sanding) metal parts to a specified flatness or finish. This is the first use of QFD at this facility. It is the first example the authors have seen of its use for generic process characterization. It is normally used to define product needs. 13 refs., 16 figs., 5 tabs.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the potential use of quality function deployment (QFD) in the selection of cross-border Third Party Logistics (3PL) provider. Our approach involves extending conventional QFD with Bayesian Networks (BN) with ranked nodes and a multi-criteria decision analysis method such as Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). This way, cross-border 3PL provider selection process will incorporate voice of overseas customers and expert knowledge. Cooperating with Lovely Wholesale, a cross-border e-commerce wholesaler of women's clothing; we record the voice of customer (VOC) through a survey, develop decision criteria and compute their relative importance weights and build a correlation matrix using the House of Quality (HOQ). A causal nexus graph is formed based on the correlation analysis. We use a parameterization of BN called Ranked Nodes, which lets experts contribute their expertise in the form of natural language phrases. BN produces the decision matrix while the relative importance weights are used as weights of criteria in ranking with TOPSIS. A successful ranked list of alternatives confirms that the methodology developed in this work may aid in selecting the most appropriate cross-border 3PL provider considering the voice of customer.

Design for Disassembly (DfD) is a challenging concept that facilitates the disassembly of products for refurbishing and reusing their components. In the context of circular economy, DfD minimizes value loss at the end of product’s life and remanufacture costs and maximizes environmental benefits. Therefore, DfD considers technical, environmental financial and social factors, but they are rarely integrated. Today, many studies state that the use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach as a decision support tool helps to make choice by promoting one criterion over one another. However, a systematic approach should also consider uncertainties associated with DfD such as technical features, the recovered parts, the disassembly process, and the optimal disassembly sequence due to the product complexity. The current paper analyzes and compares different QFD approaches in the literature review and then provides a new Fuzzy Sustainable QFD (FS-QFD) methodology, which integrates the three pillars of sustainability. Finally, it shows the effectiveness of the suggested approach through a numerical example.

This paper describes and illustrates a tailored version of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methodology referred to as the “House of Quality”. The tailoring has been accomplished to facilitate the use of QFD by systems engineers—especially in the early project phases. All steps are completely documented as are the augmentations to the standard QFD approach. These augmentations include project initiation; requirements normalization; customer, opportunity, and integration impact scoring; system concept scoring; and system concept synthesis and selection. The closing section describes a NASA project in which this tailored approached produced significant and quantifiable cost savings.

Models and scientific evidence suggest that firms are more successful at new-product development if there is greater communication among marketing, engineering, and manufacturing. This paper examines communication patterns for two matched product-development teams where the key difference between the groups is that one used a phase-review development process and the other used Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a product-development process adopted recently at over 100 United States and Japanese firms. To our knowledge, this is the first head-to-head comparison of traditional U.S. product development processes with QFD. Our data suggest that QFD enhances communication levels within the core team (marketing, engineering, manufacturing). QFD changes communication patterns from “up-over-down” flows through management to more horizontal routes where core team members communicate directly with one another. On the other hand, the QFD team communicates less on planning information and less with members of the firm external to the team. If this paucity of external communication means that the team has the information it needs for product development, and the QFD process has provided an effective means for moving the information through the team, it is a positive impact of QFD. If the result means that QFD induces team insularity, even when the team needs to reach out to external information sources, it is a cause for concern.

Aircraft conceptual design is the very beginning of aircraft design process in which one or several aircraft configurations are created to meet the top-level requirements of aircraft. The aim of this paper is to build a more traceable, structured and systematic process of aircraft conceptual design by use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method. The conceptual design of a narrow body commercial aircraft is used as an example to illustrate application of the QFD. The top-level requirements of the commercial aircraft are defined. The conceptual design activities such as initial sizing of aircraft, wing configuration design, fuselage configuration design, and empennage configuration design are accomplished using House of Quality (HOQ). During initial sizing of aircraft, the top-level requirements of aircraft are converted into the requirements for aerodynamics, propulsion and weight with the aid of HOQ and constraint analysis. During configuration designs of the wing, fuselage and empennage, their requirements are identified based on the top-level requirements and output of the initial sizing, and consist of requirements of aerodynamics, structure, control, safety, operation, cost and etc. Several HOQs representing the relationships between the requirements and the configuration design parameters are created. After that, the configuration design parameters are selected with the aid of the HOQ and relevant design knowledges. By use of the QFD, aircraft conceptual design activities are represented by a number of the HOQ and the design process of configuration parameters is traceable through the HOQ. It is concluded that the QFD-based aircraft conceptual design is more traceable, structured and systematic than the traditional method.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely used quality system tool for translating customer requirements (CRs) into the engineering design requirements (DRs) of products or services. The conventional QFD analysis, however, has been criticized as having some limitations such as in the assessment of relationships between CRs and DRs, the determination of CR weights and the prioritization of DRs. This paper aims to develop a new hybrid group decision-making model based on hesitant 2-tuple linguistic term sets and an extended QUALIFLEX (qualitative flexible multiple criteria method) approach for handling QFD problems with incomplete weight information. First, hesitant linguistic term sets are combined with interval 2-tuple linguistic variables to express various uncertainties in the assessment information of QFD team members. Borrowing the idea of grey relational analysis (GRA), a multiple objective optimization model is constructed to determine the relative weights of CRs. Then, an extended QUALIFLEX approach with an inclusion comparison method is suggested to determine the ranking of the DRs identified in QFD. Finally, an analysis of a market segment selection problem is conducted to demonstrate and validate the proposed QFD approach.

Application of quality function deployment in the semiconductor industry: A case study

PurposeThe application of three-dimensional (3D) printing technology in construction projects is of increasing interest to researchers and construction practitioners. Although the application of 3D printing technology at various stages of the project lifecycle has been explored, few studies have identified the relative importance of critical success factors (CSFs) for implementing 3D printing technology in construction projects. To address this research gap, this study aims to explore the academics (i.e. researchers) and construction practitioners’ perspectives on CSFs for implementing 3D printing technology in construction projects.Design/methodology/approachTo do this, a questionnaire was administered to participants (i.e. academics and construction practitioners) with knowledge and expertise in 3D printing technology in construction projects. The collected data were analysed using mean score ranking, normalization and rank agreement analysis to identify CSFs and determine the consistency of the ranking of CSFs between academics and construction practitioners. In addition, exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the relationships and underlying constructs of the measured CSFs.FindingsThrough a rank agreement analysis of the collected data, 11 CSFs for implementing 3D printing technology were retrieved (i.e. 17% agreement), indicating a diverse agreement in the ranking of the CSFs between academics and construction practitioners. In addition, the results show three key components of CSFs including “production demand enabling CSFs”, “optimize the construction process enabling CSFs” and “optimized design enabling CSFs”.Originality/valueThis study highlights the feasibility of implementing the identified CSFs for 3D printing technology in construction projects, which not only serves as a reference for other researchers but also increases construction practitioners’ awareness of the practical benefits of implementing 3D printing technology in construction projects. Specifically, it would optimize the construction lifecycle processes, enhance digital transformation and promote sustainable construction projects.