IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 48, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 200181Key Factors in the Successful Application of Quality Function Deployment (QFD)John J. Cristiano, Jeffrey K. Liker, and Chelsea C. White, III, Fellow, IEEEAbstractIn the product design and development process, quality function deployment (QFD) provides a comprehensive, systematic approach to ensure that new products meet or exceed customer expectations. This paper reports on the results of a survey of more than 400 companies in the United States and Japan using QFD. The objective of the study was to understand the key factors that result in the successful application of QFD. The research questions investigated in this study were developed both inductively from QFD case studies in the United States and Japan and deductively from the literature. Regression analysis estimates the effects of organizational characteristics, data sources, and QFD tools and techniques on QFD improvements in the product and process. The results show that QFD is most likely to have a positive impact when there is management support for QFD and new customer data specifically collected for the QFD study are used. The benefits of QFD are independent of the tools and techniques used as part of the QFD study.Index TermsAdoption of technology, implementation of tech- nology, QFD, quality function deployment, quality tools.I. INTRODUCTION SUCCESSFUL companies in todays dynamic global economy are those that are able to efficiently design, develop, and manufacture products that will be preferred by customers over those offered by competitors. The emergence of a global economy characterized by intense international competition, fragmented markets of discriminating customers, and rapid technological change has provoked a new industrial revolution 1. At the center of this revolution is a need to deliver product designs that meet these customer needs while making the designs manufacturable at a competitive cost within very short time frames. A philosophy for restructuring these processes, called concurrent engineering (CE) (a.k.a. simul- taneous engineering or overlapping tasks), was rediscovered by U.S. industry through the study of successful Japanese automobile manufacturers during the 1980s 1, 2. In this period, companies realigned their entire organizations around product teams to support CE, as illustrated by Chryslers organization into platform teams and the Ford 2000 program 3, 4. In a broad sense, CE advocates the early involvement of all business functions in product design and development decisions. Increasingly, CE means integrating the fuzzy front end of marketing into the detailed design of the product 5.Manuscript received February 12, 1999; revised February 12, 2000. This work was supported by the Japan Technology Management Program at The University of Michigan, under a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Contract DOD-G-F49620-93-1-0612. The authors are with the Department of Industrial and Operations Engi- neering, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48103 USA (e-mail: likerumich.edu). Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9391(01)01635-X.One Japanese design and developmentmethodology that aids in this effort is quality function deployment (QFD). The QFD methodology provides a structured framework for concurrent engineering that ensures that the “voice of the customer” is in- corporated into all phases of product development 6. Unlike many quality methodologies that were developed in the West and transferred to Japan, QFD was developed in Japan and has been adopted by many U.S. companies. The implementation of QFD reportedly results in many significant improvements in the product design and devel- opment process 79. These include 1) a reduced product development cycle, 2) a reduction of problem/redesign “spikes” during production start-up, 3) improved product quality, and 4) increased customer satisfaction. Fig. 1 illustrates the “typical” effect that QFD is reported to have on product design and development processes. The resulting process increases com- petitiveness by allowing the company to bring customer-driven, high-quality products to market more rapidly. QFD continues to be a popular tool and has been referred to as “one of the most useful techniques in total quality management” 10. AvarietyofapproachestoQFDhavebeenimplementedinthe UnitedStateswithvaryingdegreesofsuccess,whereasJapanese practitioners have consistently reported improvements in both the products and the processes 11. The reported leadership of Japanese manufacturers in product development time and cus- tomersatisfactionhasledtoaninterestinunderstandingthesim- ilarities and differences in how the QFD methodology has been applied and adapted in Japan and in the United States. In addi- tion, there is an interest in the relationship of these factors to the degreeofsuccessachieved.Todate,however,therehasnotbeen acomprehensivestudyofQFDusag