Six Sigma: House of Quality | Study.com

House of Quality as a Customer analysis tool

As mentioned, The House of Quality is an important part of the Quality Function Deployment process. QFD forms part of the planning process for products or services as per the requirements of a customer. The House of Quality comes is a customer analysis tool. The tool is used to analyse the customer needs and wants through the creation of a relationship matrix.

The House of Quality Diagram is an important tool for carrying out technical bench marking. This is the process of determining the extent to which an organization and its competitors are able to fulfill customer requirements. This is especially so in the area of bench marking. The bench marking processes follows a scoring method with the highest score being four in some cases and the lowest score being 0. These scores are usually plotted at the bottom of the House of Quality. The following is an example of the process used to build a House of Quality analysis.

Example: House of Quality

The following example provides a simple summary of the way in which the House of Quality matrix is used to analyze customer requirements. The example is created for a website development company. The example attempts to map customer requirements to the various assets that need to be purchased in order to meet the requirements of the company.

The following diagram illustrates House of Quality:

• The left side of the diagram displays the customer’s specific requirements. This is covered under the ‘Customer Importance’ part of the diagram. This aspect of the diagram indicates aspects of the finished product that the customer sees as very important.
• The ceiling describes the technical features and design functionalities specified by the customer. For this particular diagram, this can be seen under the Enterprise product development capabilities. These show the various characteristics that the systems is required to have.
• The roof represents the relationship between the various design features and customer requirements. These relationships can be specified in a number of ways such as strongly correlated or weakly correlated
• The right side or the foundation part of the House of Quality is used to benchmark against various competitors providing similar products. The bench-marking process is critical as it helps in the process understanding and attaining the best approaches that will be used by the organization to satisfy its customers.

Lesson Summary

This lesson examines an important tool used in the process of product development more Specifically in the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process. The House of Quality is used mainly in the Product Planning and Design phase of the QFD. The House of Quality is a customer analysis tool that is used to better understand customers requirements and to carry out Technical Industry Benchmarking. The House of Quality closely resembles a house and is made up of the following parts. The left side which displays the customer requirements, the ceiling which describes the technical features specified by the customer, the roof that describes the relationships between the various features and requirements, the right side which shows technical bench-marking between the organization and its competitors.