UT EID: ssg954 C&I Assignment I Shailee Desai

The House of Quality

The House of Quality is a way of mapping customer requirements to the engineering details.

This method of project management brings engineering, manufacturing and marketing teams

together. The most significant aspect of this approach is applying the idea of simpler times

when consumers and producers were in direct contact as compared to larger organizations in

the current scenarios where all groups are fairly bifurcated. This approach helps designers or

engineers better understand needs of market and weight every engineering feature from

consumer perspective. House of Quality can be considered as a prioritization tool, in a way

that it makes you understand what customer attributes (CA) are most important and which

engineering characteristics (EC) are required to affect the particular CA. The house of quality

also articulates interrelation between ECs and the competitive advantage a product has over

other product and which ECs outperform vs underperform. To effectively create the House of

Quality, you need access to Customer Need analysis report which can be obtained through

surveys, focus groups; Precise engineering of which EC affects which CA, the interrelation

between ECs, and target value needed to outperform competition and competitors

performance for a particular EC. The house of quality, the basic design tool of the

management approach known as quality function deployment (QFD)1 While doing the team

project to design a self cleaning comb we prepared a customer need analysis report and based

on that build the QFD. While preparing it the key challenge was to identify engineering

features and allocate it with related needs and wants. Defining the correlation of each feature

was the toughest part. For example, how surface area of bristles is related to the static current

and how temperature setting is related to material of the comb. QFD helps in making a design

correct by construction instead of revamping it every time the customer faces an issue.

Incremental changes over the entire product cycle raises the engineering cost of the product.

House of quality is beneficial to all the companies but actual implementation can be a

1 The House of Quality by John R. Hauser and Don Clausing Page 1

UT EID: ssg954 C&I Assignment I Shailee Desai

challenge. QFD works for products that are mainly centric to manufacturing or process.

Authenticity of survey, quality of focus group, sample space evaluation and many more

metrics are to be considered before drafting a basic layout for QFD. House of quality gives

enough scope to incorporate changes which can be modelled to serve needs of the company

and the consumer.

1 The House of Quality by John R. Hauser and Don Clausing Page 2