The Application of Quality Function Deployment (qfd) to Design a Course in Total Quality Management (tqm) at the University of Michigan College of Engineering

There are many pressures on universities these days to reduce costs without reducing the quality of education. The author has used Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to design a new course in Total Quality Management (TQM) that has increased the student to teacher ratio in the course, grown from one section to three, and continuously sends student teams into various departments in the University and local businesses to improve their quality programs, as well. This paper shows the step-by-step application of QFD that focuses both on external evaluators of the University (companies that hire graduates) and internal evaluators of the University (the students themselves). 1140 Morehead Ct. Ann Arbor, MI 48103 U.S.A. Fax: +1 (313) 995-0847 E Mail: [email protected] University of Michigan TQM 401 Home Page[28]: http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~gmazur/tqm.html ICQ ’96 Yokohama  1996 Glenn Mazur 2 teaching at The University of Cincinnati Department of Industrial Engineering [14]. In this case, various customers such as businesses and students were identified, and their needs were translated through QFD into “product features” such as “communication skills, practical knowledge,” etc. which were translated into “process features” such as “presentations, project reports, lab experiments,” etc. QFD was used by Lakeshore Technical College in Wisconsin to increase the variety of course offerings and other structural issues such as parking etc. for its students [15]. Curriculum was addressed again in 1995 by Hillman and Plonka of Wayne State University [16] which portrayed the strong relationship between the needs of industry and the employability of engineering graduates. A full engineering curriculum update by Rosenkrantz led to an almost course-for-course match to SME Curricula 2000 recommendations at California State Polytechnic University [17]. A new application of QFD to strategic planning and funding was done at the University of Vermont by Hummel [18]. QFD activities to improve European institutions have also been taking place. Clayton reported on the use of QFD to build a degree program in the Department of Vision Sciences at Aston University in the United Kingdom [19]. Nilsson et al reported on the use of QFD to develop a Mechanical Engineering Program more responsive to the needs of changing industries in Sweden [20]. QFD was applied by Seow and Moody to design an MSc degree in Quality Management at University of Portsmouth in the UK [21]. Conjoint Analysis has been recently employed in the market research end of QFD and a study was conducted by Gustafsson et al at the University of Linköping, Sweden to develop a TQM course curriculum [22]. In Japan, Akao, Nagai, and Maki have systematized a process for identifying and analyzing both the internal and external evaluators of higher education and using QFD to identify and improve critical and conflicting needs [23]. Tiede polled the perception of Australian high school educators about QFD after it was used to strengthen the understanding of school policies by students, parents, and staff [24]. 3. TQM 401: A SENIOR AND GRADUATE COURSE IN TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT In 1993, the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan introduced a course in TQM in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering. Capitalizing on many of the quality control techniques gaining popularity in the automobile industry, such as Taguchi Methods, Cpk measurements, SPC, etc. a professor assembled a course to cover these techniques. After its initial offering, the professor invited the author to take over the class. Because of my exposure to many advanced quality techniques, such as QFD, I decided to apply these to structuring the course according to customer needs. My first application of QFD to a service sector activity had been in 1985 in my private Japanese translation business [8]. I had also used QFD to design several training courses on Japanese business and in QFD itself [25]. The benefits of using QFD were that I could focus my constrained resources, in my case time, on those areas that mattered most to the customers of my course. The word “customer” must be interpreted broadly. Traditionally, instructors do not look at their students as customers, but more like “raw materials” to be molded into a “product” that industry and society will accept. A more capitalistic interpretation is that students spend money and have choice. What I expected QFD to achieve was a course that would give students marketable knowledge and skills, and would be packaged such that the best students would choose it over other course options. I knew the starting point was to identify the customer. External evaluators University External evaluators (before entering (after graduation) university) Secondary school Parents Student Education process Self check & evaluation evaluation Internal Evaluators Student Faculty Administrators Staff Industry Community evaluation evaluation Fig. 1 Akao's concept of university evaluators [23] 3.1 The External Evaluator: Industry Dr. Akao of Asahi University and one of the founders of the QFD methodology 30 years ago, has described two groups of customers of a university, which he calls internal and exICQ ’96 Yokohama  1996 Glenn Mazur 3 ternal evaluators [23]. See Figure 1. Since my concern was for a single course rather than a full curriculum or degree program, my customers were limited to industry as the external evaluator and the student as the internal evaluator. TQM401, being a 400 level course, was intended for graduating seniors in Industrial Engineering who would be expected to participate in ever growing TQM activities in companies that were hiring them. Thus, it made sense to me to focus on those industries which frequently hired University of Michigan graduates and their future bosses as the customers. Since Michigan is the automobile capital of the world, I consequently spoke with a number of engineering managers in the automobile, automotive parts, and also the electronics industries. My purpose was to find what capabilities they wanted new hires have in addition to their engineering specialty. Their responses were then grouped using the KJŒ method into an Affinity Diagram which help structure the requirements from the customers’ point of view. See Figure 2. When coupled with a hierarchy diagram, unspoken requirements can also be identified. Engineering managers were also asked to prioritize their needs using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP uses pairwise comparisons that allow for an accurate measure of importance, including a ratio scale distance between values, unlike the more traditional rating scale used in QFD. The results are shown in Figure 3 using the first level of detail only. Engineering manager's requirements (non-technical) for new hires Organized