Summary

Quality-conscious organizations around the world have used QFD for more than 30 years. Its adaptability to nearly any product development project has earned QFD the reputation of being a methodical approach to ensure customer satisfaction with the quality of new products and services.

QFD has migrated upstream steadily since Akao introduced the method in the 1960s. For its first ten years, QFD focused on internal deployments within the company's operations to ensure that quality requirements were accurately communicated throughout the development and production processes. In its second decade of use, QFD incorporated external analyses of customer requirements based on examining actual uses by customers.

In its third decade, we now see QFD in the initial phases of product concepting [Rings et al. 1998]. Further, QFD is now being used to integrate the hardware, software, service, and process aspects that are common in most products today.

MD Robotics has continued to apply QFD to other products in its traditional lines of business with great success. Unlike what happened with dinosaurs, it is expected that the company's use of QFD will continue to evolve in order to ensure that its customer-driven focus will never become extinct.