The intermediate structure of designs for quality

Changes in world markets have brought renewed interest in quality management, and a proliferation of quality‐assurance methods. The new methods focus on design rather than inspection, thereby shifting managers’ attention from inspecting quality to designing quality into products and services. A powerful approach to designs for quality is the quality function deployment (QFD) process. QFD’s simplification procedures call for improvement through the analysis of indirect relationships among quality’s ends and means. An illustrative example enhances QFD’s capability of capturing and representing the effects of multiple interdependencies among specifications and design variables, while the computation that matrix multiplication requires is both simple and efficient.