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Building in the Voice of the Customer. (Quality Functional Deployment.)



In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of : BA(Ordinary) Food Marketing



Building in the Voice of the Customer.



The first understanding of "building in the voice of the customer" for the manufacturer, are you producing a product that the consumer feels satisfied with? Within so many products there are sometimes so many misunderstandings because the customer and the product development teams speak completely different languages. For example a customer may state they would like a car that is easy to start, this interpretation to the engineers is the production of a car that starts within 10 seconds of continuous cranking. Another example could be the customer wants a "soap leaves the skin soft" this must be translated into pH or hardness specifications for the bar of soap.( Evans 1993 ) By the incorrect translation within the organisations different departments, the customers' requirements can become irreclaimable and lost forever. The Japanese developed the concept of quality functional deployment (QFD) to hopefully ensure that all customer requirements were discovered throughout the stages of design process and also in the area of design of production systems. QFD is fundamentally a philosophy and is driven by an arrangement of planning and communication tools that is aimed totally to the customer needs and requirements, this is done by co-ordination within the design, the manufacturing and marketing of goods. QFD originated in 1972 at Mitsubishi's Kobe shipyard site, Toyota then took over the development of QFD. QFD is now used successfully world-wide by manufacturers of electronics, appliances, clothing, construction equipment and by firms such as General Motors, Ford, Mazda, Motorola, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Proctor & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, and AT&T ( Evans 1993 ) Within a critical...