As a part of learning something new everyday, I decided to brush up my skills on what used to be one of my favourite topics, House Of Quality.

Six Sigma is a management principle followed in some of the leading fortune 500 companies such as GE and Motorola, which believe that repeatable processes are the key to the success of the business. This is a large subject with a lot of useful processes and concepts, some of which are my favourites.

House of Quality is one of those concepts, which I believe it as I have seen that the time invested in learning this model is worth the returns. Hence I thought I should write about it so that it can be useful to someone who wants to know what it is about.

House of Quality (a part of the Quality Function Deployment process in Six Sigma) is basically a matrix that is developed to assist product development teams with complete understanding of the client requirements and also prioritize based on the weightage given to each item by the client in the requirements.

The customer requirements represent ‘What is required’ while the technical requirements represent ‘How the requirement is going to be handled’. The beauty of it is the fact that it shows exactly how each of the customer requirements flow through the matrix and end up being a part of the final output that is to be delivered.

Another important benefit in using the House of Quality matrix is that the output targets achieved from this model can be actually used as inputs when used in the Clausing Four Phased Model (will write a separate blog about it later). Thus it is very easy to see how the product targets, arrived at by understanding the customer requirements in this phase, can be used as the product requirements for the next phase, to arrive at the module targets at the end of the next phase, which in turn forms the inputs for the process phase, which gives the exact process targets to be used as inputs to the final target production settings.

I have used the House Of Quality Matrix in the past and felt happy to try it out again for a real product I would like to build in the near future.

If you are interested in learning about it, the following tutorial available at Web Educate House Of Quality – QFD Tutorial is a very good visual representation of the idea

If you are further interested in actually trying out the HOQ matrix yourself, this website has some useful excel templates that you can download and use:
House Of Quality Matrix Excel Templates

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions on this as I am planning to use this actively for myself going forward.