QFD is ensuring customer's requirement right from the design stage of a product development process to product dispatch to customer aimed at customer's satisfaction.
The approach is from upstream looking down stream, meeting customer needs of quality all through.
Customer quality needs focused right from design to process and product completion stage is called “listening to voice of customer”.
- Survey to ascertain customer needs.
- Study the important characteristics of quality in the target market for the product.
- Conduct an analysis of competing products in the market and determine selling/marketing features.
- List down the demanded quality characteristics to be deployed.
- Determine the degree of importance of each demanded quality.
- Make a chart combining demanded quality and quality elements to be deployed.
- Analyze how other products of competing companies perform with respect to these quality elements.
- The principle objective of FMEA is to anticipate the most important design problem early in the development process and either to prevent these problems from occurring or minimize their consequences, as cost effectively as possible.
- FMEA is a formal and systematic approach for analysis of potential failure modes within a system and for classification by the severity and likelihood of failure.
- Failure Mode: The manner in which a process or a part can fail in meeting the specifications.