Quality Function Deployment (QFD), sometimes called the "House of Quality," can offer a technique to help you identify and translate customer needs and desires to the internal language of your product or service processes or procedures. By focusing within your organization on the control and improvement of those characteristics, customer satisfaction can be positively impacted. As many organizations have turned to cross-functional teams as a prime mechanism of their TQM initiatives, some find that those diverse specialists often have difficulty relating to each other. Originally used primarily for manufacturing, the methodology has found widespread applications more recently in the service field as well. Teams can find it very challenging to understand and weigh the various and sometimes conflicting demands of the customer relative to aspects of providing the services or producing the products. QFD is a tool that can breach functional barriers and encourage synergistic teamwork.

Although well established as a viable technique to support the implementation of TQM, QFD is frequently perceived as overly complex and extremely confounding. Some organizations have found a "full blown" QFD study can literally take years, with results available long after they were needed. However, there need be no fear or horror of the "House of Quality." By the application of the basic concepts, meaningful guidance can be attained in reasonable time and in a wide variety of applications to have a significant impact on your services or products. The course focuses on a step-by-step methodology to construct a rather simple, but nonetheless elegant, nine-room house.

• How to construct a simple QFD matrix (House).
• How to develop and organize customer wants and needs.
• How to translate the Voice of the Customer (VOC) into service or product characteristics.
• How to cross-check for tradeoffs and conflicting characteristics.
• How to use customer perceptions and priorities, as well as baseline and benchmark measurements, to define improvement targets.
• How to initiate & manage the QFD process to avoid common pitfalls and potential problems.