Application of quality function deployment (QFD) to print quality assessment activities

The most important mission of a print quality program is to ensure that the print quality customers demand is designed into the finished product. To accomplish this, a print quality program must perform five tasks: (1) understand customer requirements; (2) assess objective print quality; (3) relate customer requirements to objective measures; (4) set tolerance limits; and (5) benchmark the competition. Individually, these five tasks generate a wealth of information useful in marketing and engineering decisionmaking. However, it is even more effective to organize these tasks into a single unified framework. The results can be surprising. Relationships between seemingly unrelated tasks can be identified; critical items become more obvious; and places where tradeoffs can be made become apparent. This paper describes how the technique of quality function deployment (QFD) can unify these five print quality tasks, thereby catalyzing beneficial interactions among marketing, engineering, and print-quality organizations.