Full Length Research Paper. Engr. Khandaker Dahirul Islam* 1 and Dr. Ahsan Akhtar Hasin 2

Transcription

1 Merit Research Journal of Business and Management Vol. 2(1) pp , January, 2014 Available online Copyright 2014 Merit Research Journals Full Length Research Paper A qualitative transfer of the requirements of teachers into technical requirements: Use of House of Quality (HOQ) matrix in Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Engr. Khandaker Dahirul Islam* 1 and Dr. Ahsan Akhtar Hasin 2 Abstract 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Sylhet International University, Bangladesh 2 Department of IPE, BUET, Dhaka, Bangladesh *Corresponding author s to.mithun@yahoo.com Tel: The article expounds and elucidates the requirements of the teachers in academic institutions and also interprets those requirements (Voice of the Customers, VOC) into an appropriate numbers of engineering targets to be met such that they get satisfied. The teachers as the customers in an academic institution may have a number of requirements which in fact are too vital in satisfying; finally the aim goes to fulfill a target ensuring their satisfaction. The paper is here to assure that, true teachers needs are properly deployed throughout a specified design. It also has been depicted here that how the requirements are treated in a way to maximize the effort so that their requirements can be settled to certain satisfactory levels. The transformation of the demands of the customers into some quality requirements through the process of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is very important in the sense that the customers satisfaction can be met. In this article, it is targeted to produce some technical requirements from the teachers requirements in the production and development of a quality outcome. The main focus of attention in QFD is the House of Quality (HOQ), which becomes the central tool of QFD. The requirements of the teachers in this paper are laid down structurally and systematically for an anticipated product or process development. Keywords: Academic Institution, Voice of the Customer, Teachers Requirements, Technical requirements, Quality Function Deployment, Quality Education. INTRODUCTION Quality is a determinant of customer, not producer (Hasin, 2007). Quality parameter must be determined only after acquiring customer requirements or wants. Thus quality is an aspect that must be designed into the product, not inspected into it. Quality is what meets the needs of the customer with adding more values in it so that, the customers might be satisfied. This focus on satisfying customer s needs places an emphasis on techniques such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to help understand those needs and plan a product or service to provide superior value (Hasin, 2007). House of Quality (HOQ) matrix forms the basic tool of QFD and is its most recognized form. It is utilized by multidisciplinary teams to translate a set of customer requirements (Voice of the Customer), market research and technical benchmarking data into an appropriate number of prioritized engineering targets to be met by a new product design (Hasin, 2007). The product of

2 008 Merit Res. J. Bus. Manag. Education is often intangible and difficult to quantify because it is reflected in the transformation of individuals in their knowledge, their characteristics, and their behavior (Bowen, 1980). The institution must function properly, efficiently and for meeting the target, so that the various customers may get satisfied. In the competitive environment, the educational institutes are not kept aside of concern. Rather in a total business process, it is a great concern that how the institutions are doing in satisfying its customers ensuring in giving the quality education service. One of the principal targets of an academic institution is to provide quality education and the responsibilities go in fact to the teachers, the education providers. But this is not the end. There must be some requirements of the teachers that demand to be met. Thus this is a must to satisfy them along with other stakeholders yielding sufficient facilities and opportunities. The teachers are one of the main clients of the institute without who education can t be scattered and thus they become the marrow of an educational institute. Objectives The research elaborates the first phase of Quality Function Deployment in building House of Quality (HOQ) matrix. HOQ is a diagram, resembling a house, used for defining the relationship between customer desires and the product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants to how a firm (that produces the products) is going to meet those wants. It generally looks like a house with a correlation matrix as its roof, customer wants versus product features as the main part. It is based on the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers desires and tastes [3]. It also is reported to increase cross functional integration within organizations using it, especially between marketing, engineering and manufacturing. The step-bystep procedure of how HOQ matrix can be built for translating the requirements of the teachers would be portrayed in some following sections. The specific objectives of the present research work are as follows: a. Identification and understanding of the requirements of the external customers, here in the article, the teachers. b. Understanding of the correlation of various customer needs. c. Understanding how the requirements can be transformed into engineering requirements using some statistical tools. d. Determination of the academic performance parameters. e. Development of a scheme of Total Quality Management as per identified performance parameters. METHODOLOGY To achieve the desired output of the project, it needs to develop some processes and to follow some steps. The following step-by-step methodology will be applied to this research project: a. Preparation of questionnaire for teachers. b. Analysis of the result of the questionnaire using suitable statistical distributions. c. Conversion of the requirements of the customers into the requirements of the system using Quality Function Deployment (QFD). d. Determination of the values of performance parameters in order to measure and quantify the satisfaction levels of different stakeholders. e. Determination of precedence and interrelationships of the tools and techniques of TQM in order to develop a scheme of TQM. Delimitations The main limitation for this endeavor was about finding some relevant documents regarding the quality work of all the universities. Not so many works on this context is available. As a result there had been much tough jobs to find out some relative documents which might assist the current work. The researcher has to be restricted to the available data and interviews in order to show the already existing quality system in the university. Though, the data has been received from the students and teachers of the universities in the form of interviews and questionnaire methods, which was really a tough job as the students and teachers were in some cases reluctant to express their personal views. Quality in higher education In fact, main concern in this work is about definition of quality of higher education that has proved to be even more difficult rather than manufacturing products and services. There is no doubt about the point that quality plays an important role in today s higher education. Invisible competition between countries the quality of education is the main and important factor and this is because quality of products and services is defined by the action, decision-making, and thoughts of managers, engineers, workers, and teachers in the quality work. Like other businesses, in today s market, education and in particular higher education has entered to commercial competition, which is due to economical forces. The competition is firstly because of the improvement of the global education market, and secondly is due to the reduction of the governmental funds that encourage organizations to look for some other financial sources

3 Ahsan and Islam 009 Figure 1. Teachers requirements in group (Freeman, 1993). Therefore, identifying what does the quality mean in higher education as the first phase of quality work seems to be essential. However, still there is no one unique definition about the quality of higher education, there are plenty of these explanations that in somehow have industry perspective. Education quality is a rather vague and controversial concept and quality is a notoriously ambiguous term. Improved quality leads to improved profitability and the higher ability in attending competition, while poor internal quality leads to different problems in production, longer lead- time and at last customer dissatisfaction. When customers are dissatisfied, profitability decreases. High internal quality is a necessity for Just in Time (Bergman and Klefsjö, 2003). QFD application in higher education The requirements of the customer are a great concern in respect to develop an expected quality product. Basically it is the requirements that allow a product to be good or bad. Teachers are also one of the main customers of an academic institution. And an academic institution is actually orbited by them along with the other main customers, the students. Actually it can never be conceived of an educational environment without the amalgamation of the teachers and students. So the requirements of both the students and teachers are having such sober in importance that no other criteria can be measured in an academic institution other than this. Education is a process of converting tangible resources into intangible resources (Clayton, 1993). Higher education is needed in developing a person s creative, critical and analytical skills. The teachers must be able to solve problems independently and cost effectively and provide the knowledge towards the students properly. Higher education is not only a rigorous study process of obtaining necessary professional qualifications, but it is also an intellectual development of an individual, which will have an enduring impact on one s life. Therefore, quality education means not only the entities given by the teachers, but also to the society as a whole (Shamsuddin, 2006). Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology for the development of features, attributes, or functions that give a product or service high quality. The process is quite helpful in answering the questions on how quality education and services can be ensured after having a proper design to be made based on the requirements of the teachers, society, or the voices of customers (VOC). The application of the TQM model at educational institutes for the improvement of quality education clearly implies a paradigm shift from the view of teachers as passive consumers of information to active participants in the achievement of educational goals (Ermer, 1995). This is what an empowered customer that is a teacher is (Sakthivel et al., 2005). HOQ matrix for translating teachers requirements In the current research what is done is the first phase of QFD, building House of Quality (HOQ) matrix. HOQ is a diagram, resembling a house, used for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants to how a firm (that produces the products) is going to meet those wants. The house of quality model is for translating the requirements of the customers. Before building a HOQ matrix, it first needs to take the requirements into some of the specialized groups. As the requirements are dragged from the teachers from various departments, the whole of the requirements are treated generic other than specific. A structured questionnaire was built aiming at mapping the VOC. All individual answers were collected, summarized and evaluated. Next a focus group was asked to categorize the needs by categories. Finally a total of 14 needs were identified, as displayed in Figure 1. Building HOQ matrix In order to build a HOQ matrix for the successful translation of the teachers requirements into technical requirements, it needs to make affinity and tree diagrams. These diagrams are of great importance and convenience for building and understanding a HOQ matrix. The affinity and tree diagrams are drawn below. The values of each of the requirements must have to be measures with a view to get a proper design for ensuring

4 010 Merit Res. J. Bus. Manag. Figure 2. Affinity diagram for teachers requirements Figure 3. Tree diagram for Teachers requirements quality education, where the indices are compatible with the values of higher education, often the culture must change to support the principles (Durlabhji and Fusilier, 1999). In any higher education institution, the quality of program delivered is essential in creating the prestige and brand name of the academic entity (Zhumadil et al., 2005). The teachers statements (requirements) are to be drawn out first into some groups. These are found by extensive dealing with them through various ways. The requirements are sorted out and finally the following figure comes out as identified group pattern: The second grouping would be done using a suitable title for each of the first group. That is, for each of the group showed in above figure (Figure 1), a title is needed so that the group can be identified easily and thus the affinity diagram as follows can be made. So some closely fisted requirements under a name generate the following affinity diagram: The variables from the above affinity diagram are now portrayed in a tree diagram for the convenience of the analysis. The diagram is a very important one for strategic decision making. The all possible outcomes of the event in the diagram are too conspicuous for understanding. The basis of a tree diagram is the affinity diagram showed in Figure 2. Tree diagram is a structured diagram constructed from the top down with the levels being considered which looks like a hierarchy of the requirements of the students. The projected tree diagram is as follows: The main part of the HOQ matrix is to properly identify

5 Ahsan and Islam 011 Figure 4. HOQ Matrix for teachers requirements the customer requirements. Once it has been collected and sorted out, it then is put to the left part of the matrix. Now the whole figure above is set in the first portion of the HOQ matrix as below (Figure 4). A properly achieved HOQ matrix will do a great in having right decision to ensure customer satisfaction. The technical requirements in this case are also arranged accordingly and are put to the respective positions of the matrix in the next page. DISCUSSION The relative importance of each technical requirement of the product in meeting the customers specified needs are simply calculated from the weightings contained in the planning and interrelationship matrix section. This are shown in the row Score in Figure 4. In the figure, it can be noticed that out of 14 technical requirements, Experience got the highest priority, where Smartness has the lowest. The values are 231 and 37 respectively. These values are found by the each interrelationship weighting for each technical requirements multiplied by the respective weight of the column Percent Score in the Planning Matrix. These values are then summed up and put to the cell down the relative technical requirement column. It is visible from the matrix that, most of the requirements are too important except some of the unusual items. The teachers are really aware what they need from the institution. Of course, there have been some items to be found which was supposed to have more priorities but unfortunately, are becoming less in priority as the result implies. This is probably because of the type of the teachers they are opined for. As for

6 012 Merit Res. J. Bus. Manag. example, for morality and team spirit is one of the most important requirements. But the calculation in the above matrix identifies the them to be less in priority which unfortunately occurred due to some of the teachers doing not care them for, but which in fact should be. CONCLUSION Quality Function Deployment not only brings the new product closer to the intended target, but reduces development cycle time and cost in the process. HOQ matrix helps understand the relationship of What s with How s greatly. As a result, the desires of the customers can be very efficiently measured here of how much the technical requirements are capable. This useful matrix is led to perform the other steps of QFD process in order to translate the requirements of the customers into specific plans of product, parts, process and production plan, such that those requirements are met. The paper is targeted to analyze and identify the requirements of the teachers with a view to design such a structure for them, so that their requirements can be fulfilled. From the HOQ matrix the following are conspicuous: There is no alternating of class discussion and problem solving which got to have the highest priorities. The teachers are lacked in real life skills and experience along with other skills such as IT skill, which they must have to be attained for distributing high quality teaching. The availability of sufficient books in the library demands more to the students as an easy source to study and thus attain knowledge. The teachers must have to pay more attention to their preparedness to their lectures. Most often it has been noticed that the students are saying that their teachers are not well prepared in the classes and they shirk to the inquiries and questions of them. Teacher s flexibility is also a concern here. The students often complain that they can t reach to their teachers for having sufficient assistance. The books are the source of attaining knowledge. So the library should be well enough in accommodating sufficient necessary and updated books. The cost of education is a vital one. The administration must be aware of the cost laid down for continuing the education. The students must be satisfied if the cost of study might be reduced to a logical level. The teachers must have to cooperate with the employees, students and the other stakeholders with a view to achieve quality education that must satisfy all parties involved in the educational process. Dissatisfaction is not expected once a business process is launched, and where customer is directly related to the outcome. The system must have to be positive and stimulate a desire for change in an organization. The output of the whole academics is quite related to how the requirements of the teachers are treated and thus designed. There is no exception behind analyzing the requirements for the stir up of the whole academic works with a view to design a suitable teacherstudent oriented system, so that their satisfaction can be met. In order to meet the satisfaction, QFD is such a useful tool that can never be denied in this era of competition, where quality is the main concern. It must have to bear in mind that the quality upgrade of the design of a system is now customer dependent. The academic quality is thus depending on how teachers are thinking and how they hope from the institution. In this way of a proper analysis, there is no alternate but to use Quality Function Deployment tools. The spoken and unspoken requirements deployed in HOQ matrix must therefore maximize the quality of an educational institute. The unstated and subtle requirements here come in the light which gives the decision makers a competitive advantage. REFERENCES Bergman and Klefsjö (2003). Quality from Customer Needs to Customer Satisfaction, translate by Karin Ashing, Student litteratur, Lund. Bowen HR (1980). The Costs of Higher Education: How Much do Colleges and Universities Spend per Student and How Much Should they Spend? Jossey-Bass: San Frano, CA. Clayton M (1993). Treading the quality path: a progress report from Aston University, in Pipe, D.W. (Ed.), Quality Management in Universities, Australian Government Publishing Durlabhji SG, Fusilier MR (1999). The empowered classroom: Applying TQM to college teaching. Managing Service Quality,9(2), Ermer DS (1995). Using QFD becomes an educational experience for students and faculty. Quality Progress, May, Freeman (1993). Quality Assurance in Training and Education, Kogan Page, London, Hasin MAA (2007). Quality Control and Management, Bangladesh Business Solutions, Dhaka, John RH (1988). Don Clausing, The house of quality. Harvard Business Review, May June, pp Mizikaci, A systems approach to program evaluation model for quality in higher education, Sakthivel PB, Rajendran G, Raju R (2005). TQM implementation and students' satisfaction of academic performance. The TQM Magazine, 17), (6), Shamsuddin A (2006). QFD application to improve management education at KIMEP, Issues in Information Systems, Volume VII, No. 1 Zhumadil M, Alimbayeva D, Baiuzakova M (2005). Project Report: TQM Application in Higher Education, OMIS, BCB, KIMEP.