Quality function deployment
early stage product design and development technique
Quality function deployment (QFD) is a method developed in Japan beginning in 1966 to help transform the voice of the customer into engineering characteristics for a product. Yoji Akao, the original developer, described QFD as a "method to transform qualitative user demands into quantitative parameters, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process." The author combined his work in quality assurance and quality control points with function deployment used in value engineering.
House of quality
The house of quality, a part of QFD, is the basic design tool of quality function deployment. It identifies and classifies customer desires (WHATs), identifies the importance of those desires, identifies engineering characteristics which may be relevant to those desires (HOWs), correlates the two, allows for verification of those correlations, and then assigns objectives and priorities for the system requirements. This process can be applied at any system composition level (e.g. system, subsystem, or component) in the design of a product, and can allow for assessment of different abstractions of a system. It is intensely progressed through a number of hierarchical levels of WHATs and HOWs and analyse each stage of product growth (service enhancement), and production (service delivery).
The house of quality appeared in 1972 in the design of an oil tanker by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
The output of the house of quality is generally a matrix with customer desires on one dimension and correlated nonfunctional requirements on the other dimension. The cells of matrix table are filled with the weights assigned to the stakeholder characteristics where those characteristics are affected by the system parameters across the top of the matrix.
“Quality function deployment” enters the record as early stage product design and development technique. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quality, function and deployment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q763591. The Library of Congress control number is sh93000403. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966 and 1972.
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