Quality function deployment in construction DAVID JOAQUIN DELGADO-HERNANDEZ, KATHERINE ELIZABETH BAMPTON and ELAINE ASPINWALL* Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Department, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Received 6 July 2006; accepted 27 November 2006 Quality function deployment (QFD) is a system for translating customer requirements (government regulations, operating conditions and buyer expectations) into suitable technical characteristics and ensuring that important ones are prioritized in the design. The method has been successfully applied in the manufacturing sector; however, its benefits have not yet been fully realized in construction. The House of Quality (HoQ), the most common ‘tool’ in QFD, has been used to identify and analyse customer requirements for a new children’s nursery. A focus group was formed to gather these and a comparison made between an existing nursery and two competitors to ensure that the new build was designed to be at least as good as its competition. The results showed that QFD could be applied in construction projects as a tool for considering the most important customer requirements from the outset, with favourable indicators of project success (on- time delivery and customer satisfaction). In addition, the case study company considered it to be an innovative approach and has used the results in its designs. Keywords: Case study, quality function deployment, total quality management Introduction Similarities between the manufacturing new product development (NPD) process and the construction process have been recognized in the literature (Formoso et al., 2002). Within manufacturing, a number of methods to develop new products have been proposed, one of which is quality function deployment (QFD), a technique with the specific purpose of helping to identify and prioritize customers’ needs and transforming them into product character- istics. Over the past three decades, it has gained some recognition as an NPD method (Nijssen and Frambach, 2000), mainly in the manufacturing sector, where it has been applied in the development of products such as wires, car components and printed circuit boards. Chan and Wu (2002) carried out a literature review of QFD and reported its application in 22 countries worldwide. In fact, they found references in other sectors such as telecommunications, transport, services, electronics and construction. However, the proportion of manufacturing to construction documents was 10 to 1, so until 2002, its application in the construction industry had been limited. QFD methodology QFD was first used in the Kobe shipyards during the 1960s by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries because ships needed early design freezes as a result of the large capital investment and the long lead times involved in their development. In the 1970s it was used by Toyota to investigate rust prevention in vehicles and has been introduced by car manufacturers worldwide to help increase customer satisfaction levels. Cohen (1995) defined it as ‘a method for structured product planning and development that enables a development team to specify clearly the customer’s wants and needs, and then to evaluate each proposed product or service capability systematically in terms of its impact on meeting those needs’. The methodology comprises building one or more matrices known as ‘quality tables’. The House of Quality (HoQ), the first matrix used in the process, displays the voice of the customer (VoC) or the customer needs against the technical responses to meet *Author for correspondence. E-mail: e.aspinwall@bham.ac.uk Construction Management and Economics (June 2007) 25, 597–609 Construction Management and Economics ISSN 0144-6193 print/ISSN 1466-433X online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01446190601139917