Complexity Reduction of a House of Quality Chart Using Correspondence Analysis

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a cross-functional planning tool that ensures that the “voice of the customer” is systematically incorporated into the product planning and design stages. Impediments to the adoption of QFD as a product design aid include, among others, the large size of the house of quality (HOQ) chart. In this article, a systematic approach, based on correspondence analysis, to address the size problem is developed and presented. This method allows the designer to decompose a given HOQ chart into several subcharts, which are smaller in size, and thus make it easier to perform QFD in practice. The proposed procedure is illustrated through an example.