Identifying business priorities through quality function deployment

Purpose – Although important concepts and steps for strategic planning have been identified, there are few practical, systematic and powerful methodologies and tools to support an integrated and well‐managed process. This paper aims at describing in details how the quality function deployment (QFD) methodology can be applied in order to define the strategic priorities of a firm, to establish clear customer needs/expectations and to draw up a range of product and service characteristics in order to enhance customer satisfaction and thus competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approach – From a methodological point of view, an exploratory case study has been taken with multiple level of analysis and multiple data collection methods. The case study refers to a small manufacturing firm operating in Italy which designs and sells geothermal heat pump systems.Findings – The proposed methodology provides an excellent mechanism for integrating the important concepts and linking major steps of strategic planning a...

[1]  Biren Prasad.  Synthesis of market research data through a combined effort of QFD, value engineering, and value graph techniques , 1998 .

[2]  Miryam Barad,et al.  House of Strategy (HOS): from strategic objectives to competitve priorities , 2006 .

[3]  Ladislaus Rybach,et al.  GEOTHERMAL (GROUND-SOURCE) HEAT PUMPS A WORLD OVERVIEW , 2004 .

[4]  Tapani Savolainen,et al.  A framework for customer oriented business process modelling , 1996 .

[5]  Jan Olhager,et al.  The house of flexibility: using the QFD approach to deploy manufacturing flexibility , 2002 .

[6]  Rajesh Jugulum,et al.  Building a robust manufacturing strategy , 1998 .

[7]  Chu-Hua Kuei,et al.  Strategic marketing planning: a quality function deployment approach , 1995 .

[8]  Thomas M. Fehlmann,et al.  Strategic management by business metrics , 2003 .

[10]  Raymond Scupin.  The KJ Method: A Technique for Analyzing Data Derived from Japanese Ethnology , 1997 .

[11]  G. Mazur,et al.  GEMBA RESEARCH IN THE JAPANESE CELLULAR PHONE MARKET , 2000 .

[12]  Abbie Griffin,et al.  The Voice of the Customer , 1993 .

[13]  M. Lu,et al.  Integrating QFD, AHP and Benchmarking in Strategic Marketing , 1994 .

[14]  Yoji Akao,et al.  Quality Function Deployment : Integrating Customer Requirements into Product Design , 1990 .

[15]  Miryam Barad,et al.  Linking improvement models to manufacturing strategies - a methodology for SMEs and other enterprises , 2001 .

[16]  Robert A Hunt,et al.  STRATEGIC PLANNING USING QFD , 2005 .

[17]  Thomas J. Crowe,et al.  Using quality function deployment in manufacturing strategic planning , 1996 .

[18]  Owen Molloy,et al.  A QFD based performance measurement tool , 1997 .

[19]  T. Saaty,et al.  The Analytic Hierarchy Process , 1985 .

[20]  Ming-Lu Wu,et al.  Quality function deployment: A literature review , 2002, Eur. J. Oper. Res..