House of Quality

The "House of Quality", is the basic design tool for the operations management approach. It has been successfully used by Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics, home appliances, clothing, integrated circuits, synthetic rubber, construction equipment, and agricultural engines. Japanese designer’s use it for services like swimming schools and retail outlets and even for planning apartment layouts.

The house of quality is a kind of conceptual map which provides the means for inter functional planning and communications. Peoples having different problems and responsibilities can thrash out design priorities while referring to patterns of evidence on the house’s grid.

Building the House:

The house of quality commences with the customer, whose requirements are called customer attributes (CA) which phrases customers use to describe products and product characteristics. A car door is “easy to close” or “stays open on a hill”; “doesn’t leak in rain” or allows “no road noise.” CAs is often grouped into bundles of attributes that represent on overall customer concern, like “open-close” or “isolation”. CAs by consensus, but some companies are experimenting with state-of-the-art research techniques that derive groupings directly from customers’ responses.

CAs is generally reproduced in the customers’ own words. Experienced users of the house of quality try to preserve customers’ phrases and even clichés – knowing that will be translated simultaneously by product planners, design engineers, manufacturing engineers, and salespeople. Of course, this raises the problem of interpretation.  CAs can include the demands of regulators, the needs of retailers, the requirements of vendors, and so forth.

Using the House:

There is no cookbook procedure, but the house helps the team to set targets, which are, in fact, entered on bottom line of the house. For engineers it is a way to summarize basic data in usable form. For marketing executives is the voice of the customers.  General Managers usually discovers the strategic opportunities. Indeed, the house encourages all of these groups to work together to understand one another’s priorities and goals.

The Houses Beyond:

The principles are based on the house of quality apply to any effort to establish clear relations between manufacturing functions and customer satisfaction that are not easy to visualize. Suppose that our team decides that doors closing easily are a critical attribute and that a relevant engineering characteristic is closing energy. Setting a target value for closing energy gives us a goal, but it does not give us a door. To get a door, we need the rights parts, the right processes to manufacture the parts and assemble the product, and the right production plan to get it built.

Questions:

• What is meant by House of Quality?
• Explain about the factors involved in House of Quality.