Six Sigma Black Belts use the House of Quality (or Quality Function Deployment) during the Define phase of Six Sigma projects’ DMAIC cycle. This topic can be briefly covered in Green Belt training, or on free online Six Sigma courses. The House of Quality is one of LEAN’s more advanced techniques.
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House of Quality Steps
The six basic steps to building a house of quality are as follows: These are the House of Quality Steps:
Identify the customer’s needs.
Identify the customer’s satisfaction with the product. This refers to identifying product features, characteristics or attributes and showing how they will satisfy customer needs.
Identify relationships between how’s. Here are a few questions to answer: How does our how’s relate? What is the relationship between our how’s?
Create importance ratings. This refers to using the customer’s importance ratings and weights in the relationships in the matrix for our importance ratings.
Compare and contrast products and services. This is the question: Do competing products meet customer needs? This activity is based entirely on research.
Determine the desirable technical attributes. This step determines the desired technical attributes and compares our performance to that of the competitor.
This is the basic graphic diagram of any House of Quality.
How to Build a Quality House Example of a House of Quality
Let’s now get to the actual process of creating a House of Quality for Pizza.
Identify the customer’s needs
Customers want to eat pizza with the following main features:
Good taste
Low price
Healthy and low in fat
Attractive appearance
Hot and fresh delivery
Good texture
We need to dive into the key features in order to build a House of Quality. This is a group activity that requires brainstorming.
Good taste is the first and most important feature. A customer’s first requirement is good taste in any food item. Customers will be more likely to buy it if it is good tasting. It should always taste hot and spicy.
Low prices are the second most important feature. Customers consider price to be the second most important aspect. Customers are more inclined to buy food that is good value for money. The price should not be compromised on taste, but it should be affordable enough to satisfy the customer’s needs.
The third feature is healthy and low in fat. After eating delicious food, no one wants to be overweight or get sick. The pizza that is sold to customers should not be high in fat and should be part of a healthy diet. This is how you win the customer’s business.
Appetizing appearance is the fourth important feature. The pizza should look delicious. The pizza should look delectable, appetizing, and spicy, even though the customer hasn’t tried it yet.
The fifth feature is hot and fresh delivery. Nobody wants to eat stale pizza. Even if they ordered it at home, everyone wants fresh and hot pizza. We must ensure that all customers receive quick-n-hot delivery or we will lose them.
A good texture is the sixth main feature. The texture is the least important feature for customers. It is the same as the appearance of pizza, but it is also affected by the shape, size, baking method, and ingredients. Each variety of pizza needs to have a good texture.
We need to establish the importance ratings for our House of Quality based on customer needs. The importance ratings for our House of Quality are determined on a scale of 1 through 6.
How will the product satisfy customer’s needs?
We must reflect the customer’s needs and desires in order to build a House of Quality. Our House of Quality must be c
