INTRODUCTION
During recent years, organisations have been adopting strategies for enhancing the maintenance quality of products and processes as a means to excel in today’s competitive world. One of the current strategies being adopted in this direction by modern organisations is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). TPM couples the principles of maintenance engineering and total quality management (TQM). While few TQM strategies have been adopted, the strategy of infusing customer voices is yet to find its authentic place in TPM field. For example, customers voice the maintenance quality of products by citing the quality of service levels that they receive, against the preferred levels. There is no technique or tool available in TPM to transfer this kind of customer voice into practical arena. Whereas in TQM literature; a considerable portion of deliberations is devoted towards the use of the technique called 'Quality Function Deployment ' (QFD) - for converting the voice of customers into technical requirements.
Both TPM and QFD have played valuable roles in achieving continuous quality improvement in organisations. Both researchers and practitioners have reported a large number of successful case studies on TPM and QFD. If QFD is adopted in TPM projects through a suitable mechanism, then it will be a highly beneficial proposition for achieving higher degree of maintenance quality hence the model “Maintenance Quality Function Deployment” (MQFD) is proposed and subsequently, the receptivity of applying the same in Indian engineering educational scenario is also looked into.
1.2 QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT (QFD)
Originated in Japan in 1960 's, the popularity of QFD spread across the world in due course of time. In this era of increasing competition, QFD is supposed to reveal the hidden and open voices of customers and support the organisational managers in meeting market requirements. The implementation of QFD progresses through the
References: 2.Olhanger, J. and West, B.M. (2002), “The house of flexibility: using the QFD approach to deploy manufacturing flexibility”, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 4 5. International Journal of Mr.Pramod, V.R. Devadasan, S.R. and Jagathy Raj, V.P.(2006) "Customer voice adoption for maintenance quality improvement through MQFD and its Receptivity analysis".!nt