Talk:Quality function deployment
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quality function deployment? I believe it should be quality function development instaid.--Soyweiser 21:37, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
Reply: The translation from Japanese could be translated different ways, but generally speaking the idea is often mistakenly used to associate QFD to the organizational functions known as "Quality Engineering" or "Quality Assurance". Make no mistake, the Japanese are not talking about this narrow function when they talk about QFD. QFD is a method to transform customer needs into something that engineers can build. The translation is closer to what we would call "Systems Engineering" in the U.S. and U.K. The word "quality" is here defined by the customers to define something that is needed or wanted, i.e., are willing to pay for.
There are cultural implications of the translation. In the U.S., it is often regarded that QE/QA is not a centtral part of the product design/development activities--rather, QE/QA is often seen in the U.S. as a reactive function to design and development that fixes the problems of product development and the build or manufacturing phase. In the U.S., "Quality" is the "last line of defense", rather than the first analysis activity accomplished by the system engineer/system architect.
In Japan (in those firms where QFD is used) the QFD definition is more central and integrated into the product development environment. It is interesting that QFD was not developed from those organizations that invented systems engineering: Bell Labs, MIT (R&E), and several U.K. firms working on problems of telephony, networking, radar, and other communications. In the U.S., Systems Engineering became closely associated with military systems development, while in Japan, the efforts first centered on ship building (Kobe Shipyards), then transitioned to automobiles (Toyota, et al), then to other heavy industries. The emphasis on translating the customer need into products that customers will buy stems from the fact that the Japanese have a different product development environment. In the U.S., military product development often is a monopoly effort that is paid for entirely by the U.S. DoD and the products are bought entirely by the military. In Japan, the products are developed under company funds, marketed on the domestic and international markets in competition with other commodity items such as cars and heavy equipment, and are subject to the forces of the open market. Time-to-market and making no mistakes in basic concept development are key process needs/attributes that QFD addresses.
No external links???? :-(
