Getting the requirements into engineering – QFD

Now that we have developed a consistent way of putting our requirements down on paper for the rest of the organization to understand, we must now work to develop a way to express our requirements to engineering. This must be done so they can understand what it is we are asking for, what must be done by the organization to fulfill those requirements, and who will do it and when, so they can go about creating our new product.

To do this, we will turn to a tool called QFD. QFD originated in Japan in the late 1960s, during a time when Japan was trying to break away from its notoriety of product development through copying and imitation, to a product development process based on originality. At that time, the Japanese automobile industry was in a state of evolution, as they were growing rapidly and needed to create multiple model changes to keep up with demand. As a result, Japanese companies began to understand the importance of design quality to...