UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS VIA FOUR-PHASE CONCEPT IN BUSINESS PLANNING

Expansion of world economy brings changes in the way of thinking which can be seen in customers’ demands. This directly influences the increase in demands at designing of a new or modifications of the existing products. Quality Function Deployment is a method directed towards revealing customers’ wishes, which guarantees that these wishes have a positive effect on the product design and on the development of manufacturing process. Using and interpreting certain surveys of different types in the right way, additional advantages can be achieved in increasing of competitiveness in free markets. The most significant advantage is the possibility of using those specialists’ expressions most often used by potential customers. Another problem of market experts and designers is translation from the “language” of customers to the “language” of quality characteristics. This problem is solved by using quality matrixes called the “house of quality” by Japanese. The “house of quality” is very appropriate and clear form of concise presenting of numerous data which refer to quality analysis, planning and decision making. Basically speaking the method of quality function deployment serves to improve customers’ satisfaction with the product quality. What can this method contribute in comparison with already achieved results by using traditional methods in quality improvement? In this way the enterprise gets connected with its customers, and within the enterprise itself communication among different departments is improved so the new product has real chances to satisfy demands and needs of the customers. Taking into account that method of quality function deployment uses customers’ demands as input data it means that the enterprise understands customers better and their understanding of product quality. Thus, even in the phase of planning, awareness of what should be done is raised in order to increase the degree of customers’ satisfaction. Four phase quality function deployment process in the automotive industry implemented and presented in the paper. A car represents a very complex product. A great number of parts, diversity of applicable materials, numerous and complex technology processes in manufacturing, on the one side, as well as a lot of demands from developed and less developed markets, on the other hand, make car manufacturing very complex in production, economic, and technological sense. Quality Function Deployment method can be used at designing of a new car, but also at solving of some of the existing problems. When carrying out reliability testing we came to the opening of the engine lid during driving the tested car. Taking into account that it was nonconformity which endangers traffic safety, the analysis of the stated problem was carried out immediately.

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