SQFD: Designing a Comprehensive Quality Function Deployment (QFD) for Service Applications

Although the concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was originally used for product development and widely adopted by manufacturing companies, many QFD researchers have noted that it can also be applied in non-manufacturing and service environments. Whilst recent published work on service quality would still only simply describe or measure service quality and customer satisfaction, QFD could also provide structural guidelines for re-designing services as well as developing new products. There are two important groups of factors affect the delivery of quality service: the physical factors and the emotional factors. Many of the investigations on QFD have focused on the physical factors. There is no key comprehensive model in the literature which can handle the emotional factors properly. However, in order to improve the effectiveness of QFD in improving service quality, answers to the following two questions should be obtained in the first instant: “How many House of Quality (HoQ) are needed (i.e. How many QFD phases)?” “If Customer Requirements (CR) may involve trade–offs with each other, as a result of the conflict generated between different service process design characteristics (the Hows), how can the HoQ be planned and designed to cover all the CR?” In this paper, the major problems associated with HoQ have been discussed briefly. Following a review on the literature and considering different applications of QFD in the service industry, a comprehensive model of QFD, the Service Quality Function Deployment (SQFD) which could be customized for use in any type of service companies with various service processes has been proposed. The proposed SQFD could handle a variety of issues, such as conflicting customers’ requirements, and large amount of input data which if prioritized inappropriately could cause vital requirements to be omitted in the service design process. This paper has also proposed the ways of determining the most desirable number of SQFD phases.

Keywords:

QFD , HoQ , SQFD , CR , Design