Utilizing QFD for translating business objectives into action plans

Selection of appropriate business action plans is an essential, but complex task as it requires an understanding of their implications for the strategic objectives in a given industrial situation. This work utilized the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method as an instrument for ranking action plans of an individual organization in terms of its business objectives. Two methodological stages are suggested. In the first stage, a House of Strategy (HOS) matrix translates the improvement needs of a company's objectives into a list of competitive priority measures ranked according to their relative importance. A Mean Square Error (MSE) criterion supporting the selection of vital competitive priorities to be improved is employed. In the second stage, each vital competitive priority is broken down into its relevant processes and an operation matrix is constructed to translate the desired improvement in the processes into a list of action plans ranked by importance. Again, the MSE criterion supporting the selection of vital action plans is used. An illustrative example has shown that when a firm's vital competitive priority is 'stable product quality, an operation matrix extracts relevant processes and translates the desired improvement in failure costs, by processes, into the relative importance of the quality system action plans.