Customer-driven product development through quality function deployment inthe US and Japan

Quality Function Deployment is a tool for bringing the voice of the custome r into the product development process from conceptual design through to ma nufacturing. It begins with a matrix that links customer desires to product engineering requirements, along with competitive benchmarking information, and further matrices can be used to ultimately link this to design of the manufacturing system. Unlike other methods originally developed in the U.S. and transferred to Japan, the QFD methodology was born out of Total Qualit y Control (TQC) activities in Japan during the 1960s and has been transferr ed to companies in the U,S. This article reports on the results of a 1995 s urvey of more than 400 companies in the U.S. and Japan using QFD. The resea rch questions investigated in this study were developed both inductively fr om QFD case studies in the U.S. and Japan and deductively from the literatu re. The reported results are in part counterintuitive. The U.S. companies r eported a higher degree of usage, management support, cross-functional invo lvement, use of QFD driven data sources, and perceived benefits from using QFD. For the most part, the main uses of QFD in the U,S, were restricted to the first matrix ("House of Quality") that links customer requirements to product engineering requirements and rarely was this carried forward to lat er matrices. U.S. companies were more apt to use newly collected customer d ata sources (e.g., focus groups) and methods for analyzing customer require ments. Japanese companies reported using existing product data (e,g., warra nty) and a broader set of matrices to a greater extent. The use of analytic al techniques in conjunction with QFD (e.g., simulation, design of experime nts, regression, mathematical target setting, and analytic hierarchy proces s) was not wide spread in either country, U.S, companies were more likely t o report benefits of QFD in improving cross-functional integration and bett er decision-making processes compared to Japanese companies. Possible reaso ns for these cross-national differences as well as their implications are d iscussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc.