House of Quality online
Turn what customers say into engineering numbers you can act on. Build a House of Quality, link it to the next stages, and see which parameters matter most — and why.
Free plan with every analysis included. No credit card.
QFD is a way to translate customer needs (the whats) into engineering characteristics (the hows) and decide which of them deserve your effort. Customers say “the kettle boils fast” and “the handle never gets hot”. Engineers need heating element power in watts and handle temperature in °C.
The House of Quality is the matrix that connects the two. Each cell says how strongly a characteristic affects a need — 1, 3 or 9. Multiply by importance, add it up, and you get a ranked list of what to work on. The triangular roof shows where characteristics help or hurt each other.
The method was developed by Yoji Akao and first used at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ Kobe shipyard in 1972. Toyota and its suppliers adopted it, and from there it spread through the automotive industry and beyond.
QFD Tool is built for product engineers, systems and quality engineers, R&D managers — and for students who need to hand in a proper House of Quality by Friday.
One House of Quality fits in Excel. A cascade of four, kept consistent through every change, does not.
Everything a House of Quality needs, plus the analysis that is painful to do by hand.
Chain as many stages as your project needs — the classic four go from customer needs to product characteristics, parts, process and production. Change something on stage one and every stage after it recalculates.
Rate each requirement from 1 to 10, mark relationships as 1, 3 or 9 with a click, set an improvement direction and target value for every characteristic. Correlations in the roof feed straight into the priorities.
Score your product and your rivals from 1 to 5 on each customer requirement, and compare measured values characteristic by characteristic. Where you lag behind, the weight goes up.
Factor in implementation difficulty and your engineers’ own assessment. A characteristic that is cheap to improve and badly behind the best competitor rises to the top.
See which customer requirements really drive the final result. If one need accounts for more than half of the outcome, it is flagged as high risk — worth a second look before you commit.
Pairs of important characteristics that pull against each other — more power vs. less noise, lighter vs. stiffer — are found automatically and ranked by severity.
Follow any final parameter back to the customer needs behind it, with the contribution of each one in percent. Handy for design reviews and for defending a decision.
Nothing to install. Documents live in the cloud and save automatically. Export to PDF or SVG, and on Pro start from a ready-made example instead of a blank page.
List what customers ask for in their own words, rate how much each need matters, and score how you and your competitors perform today.
Add engineering characteristics and fill in the matrix with a click per cell. Add a stage, and the most important characteristics arrive there as requirements on their own.
The summary report shows the driving requirements, the characteristics that matter most at the end of the chain, and the sharpest conflicts. Export it and take it to the meeting.
Anywhere you have to turn “what people want” into “what we build”. A few typical translations from a customer need to an engineering characteristic:
“The app feels fast” becomes time to first screen in milliseconds; “sign-up is painless” becomes the number of steps in onboarding. QFD helps decide which non-functional requirements deserve the next sprint.
The industry where QFD took off after Toyota adopted it. The textbook example: “the door is easy to close” turns into the energy needed to close it — which immediately collides with “no road noise” and a tighter door seal.
“The battery lasts all day” maps to capacity in mAh and standby current; “it doesn’t get hot” maps to case temperature under load. The roof shows right away that the two compete.
“Easy to use with gloves on” becomes button size in mm and actuation force in N. When every design input has to trace back to a user need, a traceability graph saves a lot of explaining.
“The line rarely stops” becomes mean time between failures; “quick changeover” becomes minutes per changeover. Later stages carry it down to tolerances and process settings.
“The kettle boils fast” means heating element power in watts; “the vacuum is quiet” means noise in dB(A). The classic place to learn QFD — everyone has an opinion about a kettle.
At a hotel, “check-in is quick” becomes average check-in time; at a bank, “no surprise fees” becomes the number of charges a customer has to understand. The characteristics here are service standards rather than parts.
QFD is a staple of quality management and product design courses. The free plan often covers a coursework assignment, and the same method works for designing a course: “practical skills” becomes the share of lab hours.
What QFD is, where it came from and what QFD software does that a spreadsheet can’t.
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A House of Quality built room by room on an electric kettle — with the priority math.
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How “lightweight” travels from a city bike’s frame mass down to welding parameters.
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Where did this tolerance come from? Tracing a drill’s grinding pass back to customer needs.
Read →No subscription and no auto-renewal: pay once for the time you need, and nothing is charged afterwards.
Compare plans →2 documents, up to 2 stages, 10 requirements and 10 characteristics per stage. Every analysis, export with a watermark.
or $249 for 12 months. No limits, clean exports, documents based on examples.
Look through the examples, then put your own product into the matrix and watch the priorities move. It takes a few minutes and costs nothing.