Summary of the case House of Quality

“House of Quality”, the basic design tool of the management approach also known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD) originated in 1972 at Mitsubishi’s Kobe shipyard site. Previously it was only used by Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Digital Equipment, ITT Ford and General Motors. Now a day, the Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics, home appliances, clothing, integrated circuits, synthetic rubber, agricultural engines and designer of services like swimming schools and retail outlets and even for planning apartment layouts. The base criteria of this tool is to make the marketing people, design engineers and manufacturing staff work together so that the designed product reflect consumers desires and tastes at its best. However, according to David Garvin, dimension of quality varies from consumer to consumer and identifying that is a big challenge for producers. It’s not that difficult to build the House of Quality yet it does need some efforts to get used to it. The House of Quality starts with customer requirements or customer attributes (CA). For example, Toyota made a list consist of 30 to 100 CAs including attributes like car door is “easy to close” or “stays open on a hill” etc. Some Japanese companies simply place their product in public areas and collect potential customers’ feedback regarding the product. Companies those do this can achieve competitive advantage successfully. But before that they need to know their position in the market. To understand this they included customers’ evaluations on competitive cars on the right side to get assessment from each segments. There is no hard and fast rule about using the House as long as it helps the teamsetting their targets. Marketing executives, general managers and engineers use it according to their own way. However, the House encourages all of them to work together for the betterment of the product. The main principle of the House of Quality is to establish an apparent relationship between manufacturing