House of Quality

House of Quality is a graphic tool for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants to how a firm (that produce the products) is going to meet those wants. It looks like a House with correlation matrix as its roof, customer wants versus product features as the main part, competitor evaluation as the porch etc. It is based on "the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers' desires and tastes" (Hauser & Clausing 1988). It also is reported to increase cross functional integration within organizations using it, especially between marketing, engineering and manufacturing.

The basic structure is a table with "Whats" as the labels on the left and "Hows" across the top. The roof is a diagonal matrix of "Hows vs. Hows" and the body of the house is a matrix of "Whats vs. Hows". Both of these matrices are filled with indicators of whether the interaction of the specific item is a strong positive, a strong negative, or somewhere in between. Additional annexes on the right side and bottom hold the "Whys" (market research, etc.) and the "How Muches". Rankings based on the Whys and the correlations can be used to calculate priorities for the Hows.

House of Quality analysis can also be cascaded, with "Hows" from one level becoming the "Whats" of a lower level; as this progresses the decisions get closer to the engineering/manufacturing details.

A Flash tutorial exists showing the build process of the traditional QFD "House of Quality" (HOQ). There are also free House of Quality templates available that walk users through the process of creating a House of Quality.

For further information about HOQ, you can visit http://www.qfdonline.com/

From: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Quality