Application of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) - HortiBot

Methodology
The overall QFD approach involves the ranking of technical specifications in relation to their
degree of contribution to the fulfillment of customer or user requirements. In other words, the
requirements of various interested parties are transformed into a description of the technical
specifications. Akao (1990) defined QFD as "a method for developing a design quality aimed at
satisfying the consumer and then translating the consumer's demands into design targets and
major quality assurance points to be used throughout the production phase". The analysis steps
in this paper focus on: 1) identifying the customers or users, 2) determining customer
requirements, 3) ranking the requirements, and 4) competition benchmarking.
QFD process
The specifics of the QFD process has been described by a number of authors (e.g. Akao, 1990;
Chan & Wu, 2005) and will include some of the following steps:
1. Customers: The first step involves identifying the customers in terms of operators, managers,
etc. of the proposed product.
2. Customer requirements (WHATs): A customer as defined in step 1 wants a product that work
effectively, is reliable and easy to maintain, includes the latest technology and looks attractive.
At the same time, the customer wants low costs. The goal in step 2 is to develop a list of
customer requirements that might affect the design and operational performance of the
proposed product.
3. Structuring customer requirements: Normally, the number of identified customer requirements
is numerous and there may be a need for grouping these requirements into selected main
categories containing a number of sub-requirements.
4. Prioritizing customer requirements: An important step in the QFD process is the assigning of
the relative importance to each requirement as perceived by the customer. In this way a
weighting factor is generated for each requirement and this factor will give the product designer
an idea of how much effort, time and money to devote to the specifics of each individual
requirement. An often used measure is a 5-point scale defined as:
not at all important not very important fairly important very important extremely important
1 2 3 4
The determination of the relative importance ratings includes averaging customer perceptions of
the identified requirement. Suppose that, by conferring with advisors and other experts in the
area of outdoor horticulture, C customers or users, denoted as U1,…,UC, are selected and R
requirements are identified and denoted by X1,…,XR. Supplemental, the R requirements may be
divided into appropriate categories.
Suppose that for customer requirement Xr , customer c provides an importance rating irc to it
according to scale (1). Then the resulting average relative importance rating for Xr is estimated
by:
C
r = ∑ irc
c=
1
i
/ C,
r = 1,
2,...,
R
5
(2)
(1)
3