Naval "Systems of Systems" Systems Engineering Guidebook- Vol. II

2. Application of Quality Function Deployment

This Section will discuss the application of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to gain an understanding of the Operational needs, and what systems improvements, changes, or new technologies can be employed to best benefit the war fighter. QFD utilizes matrices as a mechanism to assess product requirements, and when applied to Defense Systems, these matrices resemble many of the architecture views specified by DoDAF. However, since we are working with SoS/FoS, the QFD matrices will have to be customized to capture the operational, functional, and physical aspects of the Force Package.

The QFD matrixes will become another set of products generated that support the generation of DoDAF products and will become part of the SoS/FoS architecture. Most of the system data in the QFD matrices can be derived from the architectural and design data that was used to develop the system. What is Quality Function Deployment? Basically, QFD is a "quality system" used in commerciabusiness practice to improve customer satisfaction with the quality of products and services. It concentrates on maximizing customer satisfaction (positive quality) by seeking out both spoken and unspoken needs, translating these into actions and designs, and communicating these throughout the organization end-to-end. Further, QFD allows customers to prioritize their requirements, enabling the company to benchmark itself against its competitors, and then direct its efforts to optimize those aspects of the product, process, and organization that will bring the greatest value for the customer.

QFD was developed to enable product developers to improve the way they specified the requirements for their products, demanding that each requirement be traceable back to a customer need. While it can be viewed that most of today's products are in themselves systems of- systems, the complexity of the DoN System-of-Systems will require that the QFD techniques be adjusted from merely identifying “product quality” characteristics to identifying "mission effectiveness" characteristics, and tracing these through concepts of operations and through the force structure and chain of command (organizationally) to the underlying processes, practices, systems, applications and people that contribute to mission effectiveness.