Retiring the House of Quality
Rick Norman,
Tony Ulwick
Aug 27, 2009
By Strategyn's Rick Norman and Tony Ulwick, with Richard Zultner of QFD Institute
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was conceived in Japan in the late 1960s to assure quality in new product development. In 1972, the first QFD matrix, the “house of quality,” was added to QFD as a new tool. QFD spread to the United States from Japan in 1984, and in 1988, John Hauser and Don Clausing described the use of a simple subset of QFD by U.S. automotive parts suppliers in the classic Harvard Business Review article “The House of Quality” (May–June 1988).
The traditional house of quality they presented is a matrix that has been used by thousands of companies in the United States as part of their implementation of QFD. The theory behind the QFD system is that companies should be customer-driven in executing the product development process; that is, they should begin with customers’ needs, not with technology. By taking customers’ needs into account, companies are more likely to design products that customers value. To accomplish this, everyone involved in product development must work together throughout the development process to focus their best efforts on what matters most to customers. The result is a product or service superior to the competition, and which satisfies customers by providing value.
Since its introduction, companies have also used the house of quality to help execute the innovation process, a related, but distinct, discipline. Today, with innovation and product development emerging as the keys to company growth, increasing numbers of companies are attempting to use the traditional house of quality to help execute these complex processes. But as a handful of companies discovered years ago, and as other companies are quickly discovering today, the traditional house of quality is not the best tool for the innovation process or even the best tool for the product development process, where it is most commonly used. With modern methods available to execute the innovation process, specifically those integrated in Outcome-Driven Innovation theory, companies are finding that the traditional house of quality is no longer necessary for concept innovation.
Companies are also finding that the traditional house of quality requires renovation to be an effective tool in today’s complex product development process, and they are discovering the process often works better when it is begun with the maximum value table.
Given these facts, the time has come to retire the traditional house of quality from active service for concept innovation and to adopt these new successful tools and a renovated version of the house of quality for product development. By adopting these new DFSS standard practices for innovation and product development, both processes can be improved, resulting in greater value for customers and a competitive advantage for the firm.
