Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in Late Stages of Capstone Design

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is widely used to clearly define customer requirements and convert them into detailed engineering specifications and plans to fulfill those requirements in the design process both in industry and in academia. It allows for prioritization of the tasks associated with achieving a solution in an analytical and systematic way by developing metrics for the specifications of the solution. Employing QFD also creates a record of why each individual decision was made, which can be useful further in the product timeline. Students in capstone design courses are commonly required to implement QFD in the form of the house of quality early in the design process to define the problem, establish engineering specifications, prioritize specifications, benchmark, and ensure the “voice of the customer” is not lost. This is performed during the project planning and specification development or task clarification stage. QFD has been proposed in the literature as a series of cascading charts that follow the design process throughout the project lifecycle to manufacturing and quality control. While students are commonly asked to use QFD early in the design process, it is much less common for students to return to QFD throughout their projects in order to learn this cascading process. This paper will assess the use of QFD during the later stages of a Capstone project to amplify the voice of the customer and emphasize quality control. Mechanical Engineering students at The Citadel are historically required to develop a house of quality as part of an assignment generating requirements and constraints. In the beginning of the capstone project, students are introduced to the structured process of defining the customer's requirements and the process for transforming them into specific product designs. Students are required to establish the voice of the customer (VOC) into the design of their capstone project by creating, deploying, and analyzing a survey instrument and to incorporate the results into the house of quality. While they are encouraged to revisit the requirements and their prioritization, they are not formally required to further develop QFD techniques following the project planning phase. The results are assessed during the first formal design review and interim report. In this case study, these students will employ QFD techniques in the embodiment or detail design stages to translate the VOC into measureable design targets. The results will be assessed through a survey instrument and observation. The results will be used to develop future studies and to suggest methods to incorporate QFD throughout the capstone sequence and to emphasize student learning objectives.