House of quality

– No discussion of quality management would be complete without mentioning the house of quality. It’s that important, because this model helps you create products and services that your customers will want to buy. Now, the house of quality is not easy to explain. I’ve provided a couple of handouts in the exercise files. So, there are six steps to creating a house of quality. Let’s walk through them one at a time using pizza as an example. We’ll say your goal is to create a new pizza for your restaurant menu. First, you determine what your customers want when they order a pizza. You might conduct a customer survey or simply ask your wait staff. Once you determine your customers expectations you place them on the left side of your house. Notice that I’ve identified value as something the customer wants. Next, you identify the features of the new pizza you plan to design. Price and toppings are a couple of product features. These features are placed at the top of your house Which leads us to step three, analyze each box in the matrix. These boxes show the relationship between what your customer wants and what you plan to make. You want to decide if the relationship between the two is strong or weak, and in some cases there will be no relationship between them. For example, the customer wants a pizza that tastes good, but this has no relationship to the size of the pizza. But price and value have a strong relationship. Your customers won’t feel their getting value for their money if your price is too high. Next, we look at relationships between the product features and mark that on the roof of your house. If you change one feature will it have an impact on another feature? For example, if you make your pizza bigger you’ll have to charge more, so size and price have a strong relationship. Step five determines the importance of each of these features, and you do this from three different perspectives. First, for each thing the customer wants how important do you think it is to them? Notice that I’ve used a scale of one to five, and on the right side of the house I’ve noted that value is very important to the customer with a score of five. Then for each of those items, how important is it to you? I’ve entered a score of four indicating that value is somewhat important to you. Now, you do the same analysis for each of the product features, and place those scores below your house. How important are each of the product features to you as you design your new pizza? In my example I’ve given price a score of five meaning it’s very important. The final step in building my house of quality is to conduct a competitive evaluation. You want to try to figure out how your competitors prioritize the features of their pizzas, and how they view what the customer wants. You can see I’ve labeled your competitors as A and B. To the right side of your house and below it you assign a number showing how important you think each attribute is to your competitors. Once you’ve completed this model you can make some strategic decisions on how to move forward with your new product development. At your price for example, customers must believe they’re getting value for their money. As you can probably tell this can be a pretty in-depth analysis, but it can help you design a product or service that your customer wants to buy. In the long run, the house of quality could save your company a lot of time and money. could save your company a lot of time and money.