Hauser (1993): How Puritan-Bennet used the House of Quality

9 important questions on Hauser (1993): How Puritan-Bennet used the House of Quality

In what way helped The House of Quality medical equipment manufacturer Puritan-Benett?

  • This helped medical equipment manufacturer Puritan-Benett to focus effectively on the most important product characteristics
  • The new design revolutionized the product and was a phenomenal success

How does The House of Quality work?

It is part of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), which helps an
interfunctional team of people from marketing, R&D, manufacturing and sales work together to focus on product development.

QFD used four houses to integrate informational needs.
  • Applications begin with the house of quality, the team uses this house to understand the voice of the consumer and translate it into the voice of the engineer.
  • Subsequent houses continue to deploy the voice of the consumer through to parts characteristics, key process operations, and product requirements

How does the House of Quality look conceptually?

From the voice of consumers (on the left) to the voice of the engineers (on the right).
  • First, the customer needs are determined and the important of those needs.
  • Second, it's about the design attributes, the relationship between customer needs and design atributes, costs and feasibility and ''engineering'' measures
  • Last, the customer perceptions are mapped as poor or great.    
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What are the four aspects of the voice of customer within the House of Quality?

  • Identifying Customer Needs:
    • Descriptions in the customers’ own words of the benefits they want the product or service to provide
  • Structuring the Needs (into hierarchy)
    • Primary needs (strategic needs) and secondary needs (tactical needs) and tertiary needs
  • Prioritizing the Needs:
    • customers want their needs fulfilled, but some needs are more important than others. Prioritizing helps QFD team balance cost of fulfilling need with benefit to customer
  • Comparing Customer Perceptions:
    • Of how well the company’s current product and competitive products fulfil customer needs are useful for guiding product design

What are the five aspects of the voice of engineer within the House of Quality?

  • Identifying Design Attributes
    • Translating customer needs into engineering concerns. Identify measurable requirements (design attributes) that will fulfil customer needs
  • Comparing Engineering Measures
    • Compare competitive products on the physical units specified by design attributes
  • Developing the Relationship Matrix
    • Judges which design attributes influence which customer needs and how much. Specify strongest relationships while leaving most of matrix blank
  • Developing the Roof Matrix
    • Quantifies the physical relationships among the design attributes
  • Making Other Estimates
    • Team often estimates costs, feasibility, and technical difficulty for changes in each of the design attributes

What is an important disadvantage of using the House of Quality?

Developing House of Quality can be time consuming: team can spend number of months just preparing to begin design work.

Explain the use and succes of using the House of Quality for Puritan-Benett.

A working team was put together at Puritan-Benett after hearing about the House of Quality method, including people from marketing, customer service, engineering, R&D, manufacturing and management. Interviews with customers were held to reveal their needs and wants for a spirometer. That revealed that each customer segment wanted something else. Thus Puritan-Benett designed a modular system, that could be adapted to meet the needs of each customer group separately. It became a huge success.

What is the main conclusion of the article by Hauser (1993)?

Using the House of Quality as a tool for NPD reduces costs and time. By its communication structure it enables a company to develop successful products that are well-received by their customers.

What is the main conclusion of the article by Hauser (1993)?

Using the House of Quality as a tool for NPD reduces costs and time. By its communication structure it enables a company to develop successful products that are well-received by their customers.

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