Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
INTRODUCTION
In the beginning of New Product Development, organizations need to match customer requirements
and firms resources; this is eventually translated into developing products and services that feature
such characteristics and attributes that feed the need and expectations of consumers. Even though, the
fact that product development is only a partial phase of the entire product life cycle, the decisions made
during this stage are critical for the overall success and performance of the new products.
Organizations must be ready to develop products that will gradually be valued by the market, which
can be achieved through the use of Quality Function Deployment models and applications.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a way of making the 'voice of the customer' heard throughout
an organization. It is a systematic process for capturing customer requirements and translating these
into requirements that must be met throughout the 'supply chain'. The result is a new set of target
values for designers, production people, and even suppliers to aim at in order to produce the output
desired by customers. QFD is an important tool for translating the voice of customer into products
specification (Akao, 97). It has been widely used for product development and quality improvement
around the world. It is a customer-oriented approach, supporting design teams in developing new
products based on an assessment of customer needs. Basically, in the QFD, customer needs are
translated into design attributes. To begin the design process in the QFD, the design team needs to
listen to the voice of the customer.
The voice of the customer contains the customer needs expressed in their own words. It can be
captured through questionnaire, observation and so many other ways for an existing product or service.
However, for a new product, questionnaire will be the only way in most of the cases. From the
responses as collected, the team will identify the level of satisfaction of customers. If the satisfaction
level is so poor, customers grievances should immediately be heard. Customers will not spend a single
penny in the long run to purchase dissatisfaction. Even if the customers are satisfied, their voice should
be considered to make them more satisfied. The House of Quality is the most commonly used tool in
the QFD methodology. This matrix translates the voice of the customer into product specifications. The
paper deals with designing a house of quality as a QFD tool to capture voice of customers that leads to
devising the way out for ensuring more satisfaction. The use of QFD in manufacturing industry is very
common, and from such an assumption, here QFD is used in a service industry to devise out the way of
ensuring more customer satisfaction.
2.
The objective of this study is to evaluate the level of satisfaction of the respondents regarding the
service at a Bank, to study and understand the customer satisfaction among the customers, to
understand the customers attitude toward the bank and to offer suggestions to the Bank to
improve their customers satisfaction level on different factors.
3.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The purpose of this literature review is to gain an understanding of quality function deployment
process for service sector especially banks with concepts, frameworks, strategies and components that
are current and emerging in the field. The crucial elements of identifying and implementing
customers voice in production development and service improvement are examined in detail. Specific
information is given on the implementation of house of quality, its existing frameworks, trends and
important considerations.
Yoji Akao (1997) presented a paper at International Symposium on QFD 97 Linkping titled QFD:
Past, Present, and Future reflecting on the early days of QFD, the current status, and future challenges.
Much more progress is expected in the QFD world, as it renders a tangible method to manage new
product development, an area that will be most important in future TQM. QFD will be also positioned
as an effective tool for quality assurance of systems in the information age. For these goals, QFD
methodology needs to be standardized and incorporated in the ISO.
Jinea Akhtar (2011) stated that the physical aspects were positively and moderately related to service
quality. The customer services determinant had insignificant relationship with service quality.
Luis Bernal, Dr. Utz Dornberger, Alfredo Suvelza and Trevor Byrnes (2009) published a QFD
handbook for services providing step by step procedure for completing house of quality for completing
quality function deployment in a dental clinic.
4.
The nature of this report is descriptive, so instead of doing any survey or using sampling method,
observation and selective questionnaire method is used to complete this qualitative research. Most of
the necessary information has been collected by personal interview with customers of the branch; both
descriptive and inferential research were conducted to identify existing practices in their organization.
The following steps are involved in this researchStep-1: Variable selection
Step-2: Questionnaire Preparation
Step-3: Data Collection
Step-4: Data Processing and Analysis.
In the primary stage of this study, secondary data has been collected from the relevant publications,
newspapers and books. An in-depth questionnaire survey was carried out in the study area where 30
respondents were selected randomly for necessary information.
5.
THEORETICAL ORIENTATION
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a means of translating customer requirements into the
appropriate technical requirements for each stage of product or service development and production.
This approach seeks answers to the following six questions:
Voice of the customer: What do our customers need and want?
Competitive analysis: In terms of our customers, how well are we doing relative to our competitors?
Voice of the technical team: What technical measures, relate to our customers needs?
Correlations: What are the relationships between the voice of the customer and the voice of the
Technical Team?
Technical comparison: In this comparison, product or service performance compares to the
competitors to identify the improvement needs and to guide the design of the product or services.
Tradeoffs: What are the potential technical trade-offs?
5.1.
QFD is essentially a process where customers voice is translated into design attributes. A typical QFD
process has four successive phases as depicted in Figure 2.
The primary tool used in QFD is the house of quality. The house of quality translates the voice of the
customer into design requirements that meet specific target values and matches those against how an
organization will meet those requirements. It is a collection of six interrelated matrices clustered in
such a way that essentially gives shape of a house having boundaries, pavements, ceiling, roof etc. as
shown in Figure 3. Different parts of the house of quality are stated below:
1.
The customer attributes: The left exterior walls of the house represents customer requirements
determined by the market research is essentially the Voice of the Customers.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The technical descriptors: The ceiling or second floor, of the house contains the technical
descriptors describing how the product may achieve its required performance in general terms
which are not solution specific that represents the Voice of the Designer.
Relationships: The interior walls of the house are the relationships between customer
attributes and technical descriptors indicating where there are strong, moderate or weak
relationships.
Technical matrix: The foundation of the house is the prioritized technical descriptors based on
the relationships between customer attributes and technical descriptors.
Technical correlations: The roof of the house is the technical correlations representing the
interrelationship between technical descriptors. This correlation is important to show to what
extent the technical descriptors may be mutually supporting and contradictory.
Planning matrix: On the right side are the prioritized customer requirements or planning
matrix providing quantitative market data for each of the customer attributes based on user
research, competitive analysis or team assessment.
5.3
Building a house of quality is not a simple task. Marketing experts, quality team (or, say, QFD team),
and technical experts should work collectively to design the house that will ensure better quality for the
customers. However, the designing of a house of quality follows seven consecutive steps as mentioned
below:
Step 1: List Customer Requirements (WHATs)
Step 2: List Technical Descriptors (HOWs)
Step 3: Develop a Relationship Matrix between WHATs & HOWs
Step 4: Develop an Interrelationship Matrix Between HOWs.
Step 5: Competitive Assessments
Step 6: Develop Prioritized Customer Requirements.
Step 7: Develop Prioritized Technical Descriptors.
5.4
Major wants / requirements are identified from the questionnaire survey of customers of the branch.
After analyzing primary data it is tabulated as below:
Sl.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Rank
38
15
23
30
36
20
34
17
20
37
35
19
22
17
26
32
3
5
7
25
27
30
4
10
1
2
27
14
8
12
32
13
11
16
9
23
29
6
5.5
Developed Consequences
After getting the results of the questionnaire considered as voice of the customers as simplified above,
the following consequences have been developed:
5.6
After the completion of analytical section, the major findings of this research can be listed as below for
the bank to improve:
Advertisements;
Branch management;
Employee training;
Queue management;
Technology improvement.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The main recommendations in relation to this research are given as below:
Improve the quality and emotional content of the advertisements.
Improve employee training on various aspects customer service.
Improve queue management to reduce redundant delays in providing service.
Have to invest in improve technological advancements to provide e-banking services.
Improve some necessary aspects of branch management.
7.
CONCLUSION
Both manufacturing and service industries should implement quality function deployment to
improve the process continuously to improve the products and services. Customers now-a-days
are very choosy for spending paisa. Quality is the first and foremost preference. Even, they like
to state that we are paying not for the product but for the value. Therefore, it becomes a
challenge for every company to pay heed to their customers continuously and also to show
proper respects to their feelings. QFD is the right tool to listen to the customers and responding
to what they want continuously. Once customers get the idea that they are rightly addressed,
they will take care of the bank.
REFERENCES
Akao, Y. (1997). QFD: Past, Present, and Future. International Symposium on QFD 97 Linkping ,
1-12.
Authors
Authors Name: Mohammed Shaukat Ali
Authors profile: Mr. Mohammed Shaukat Ali was born at Adamjee Jute Mills under
Narayanganj district in 1975. He completed MSS in Economics and MBA in Finance from
Dhaka University in 1997 and 2007. Now he is serving his as Vice President & Manager
(Credit & Foreign Trade) in Trust Bank Limited, Millennium Corporate Branch, Dhaka. In
addition, he is at the last step in completing PGDHRM degree from Bangladesh Institute of
Management.