SQFD: QFD-based Service Quality Assurance for the Lifecycle of Services

Based on a service system, service providers offer services to customers. Quality of a service system has great influence on customer. Therefore in order to provide better services to customer, it is necessary to assure quality for the lifecycle of services. With the experiences accumulated in developing and implementing some typical IT systems in manufacturing enterprises from past decade, we have proposed a new service engineering methodology named SMDA, to assist service providers to build better service system. As part of the SMDA, the Service Quality Function Deployment (SQFD) has been proposed to consider quality aspects of a service system. SQFD, which is adopted from QFD, focuses on designing, evaluating and optimization of service quality in lifecycle of services. The three phases of SQFD, i.e., build-time QFD-oriented service quality design, run-time service performance evaluation and service performance optimization, are illustrated in this paper.