House of Quality

Service Operation Management Ashim Abhinav Ekka

Assignment 14133

HOUSE OF QUALITY

House of Quality is a diagram, resembling a house used for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants to how a firm (that produces the products) is going to meet those wants. It looks like a House with a "correlation matrix" as its roof, customer wants versus product features as the main part, competitor evaluation as the porch etc. It is based on "the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers' desires and tastes”. It also is reported to increase cross functional integration within organizations using it, especially between marketing, engineering and manufacturing.

QFD is a tool for translating customer requirements into company requirements and identifying features or capabilities required to become a best-in-class provider. Today, customers are demanding ever-more-challenging levels of quality. A customer lost due to poor quality may never return, and, even worse, may take several potential customers with it. For electronics manufacturing, in which M&As are routine and capital investment is increasing, a reasonable return on investment can be achieved only by being a superior supplier. One must understand the difference between value and price. With competition growing, it is easier to become profitable through better value than by having the lowest price.

QFD enables the preservation and use of knowledge through detailed thinking and graphical representation. This representation is known as the “House of Quality, and contributes to improved customer satisfaction, methodical decision-making, and prioritization of customer requirements. The bottom line: improved quality reduced cost, increased responsiveness.

The Rooms

The first major room is...