Design and Operations Quality: An introduction

Customers’ experiences of quality depend on, one, the product or service being designed to match their needs and, two, the operations system consistently producing and delivering it as was intended by the designer. Operations do more than simply conforming to the designer’s specification. It will learn from its own activities and the forever evolving customer feedback, thereby identifying opportunities for improvement to the original design. Design and operations are thereby elements of an integrated wider organisation, arranged around the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. This booklet introduces Quality Function Deployment as a design approach, or sub-process, within the process based ISO 9001 management system model. It demonstrates some useful design and operations tools within the model.