Voice Of The Customer And QFD
The customer cannot express what they want in precise terms; any product that fails to translate their abstract desires into concrete engineering parameters is doomed.
Listening to a customer say "I want a fast car" is the job of marketing. However, translating that demand into a "0.25 aerodynamic drag coefficient" specification is the foundation of product engineering. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is the mathematical matrix that performs exactly this translation. The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is far too critical to be left to the assumptions of internal departments.
The QFD process is built upon an architecture known as the House of Quality. This structure reveals the contradictions in customer demands from the very beginning. For instance, the demand for "lightweight" will inevitably conflict with "durability" during the design phase. Engineers must resolve this conflict long before a prototype is produced. Otherwise, the cost of a contradiction noticed on the assembly line becomes hundreds of times heavier.
