Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
individual rows. The second room - “technical specifications” - is your items from the
PDS that you use to define your device. These are tabulated as individual columns. This
table creates a square zone where the customer requirements and technical specifications
are cross-correlated. The intention of this central room is to ensure that you have at least
one technical specification for every customer need. So, for example, the customer may
have asked for the device to be blue, hence you should have a technical specification that
defines color in some way (say, a coating). The foundation of the house is the targets for
your technical specifications. So if one of your items was to define the power utilization
of your device you may have a target to not exceed 4.5 kW. The lean-to, to the right of the
house, is used to look at how well your competitors meet the customer requirements. Both
the foundation and the lean-to enable you to define benchmarks for your device that you can
use in marketing and to influence development. The last part is the roof; this is where you
examine the interaction between your technical specifications. For example, you may have
a requirement to maximize component strength and another to minimize component weight.
Clearly both interact with one another; the roof helps you to decide how they interact and in
which direction you want them to go.
The best way to see how the HoQ works is to examine one. Figure 7.8 illustrates a completed
HoQ for a piece of clinical software to help examine x-rays on a mobile smartphone.
Clearly you should appreciate that Figure 7.8 is a foreshortened example, however it
demonstrates the principle. Note that the items in the technical requirements are very much
related to how to do it, how much is needed, etc. The customer requirements tend to be
more wooly and less specific, but not necessarily so. The central room of the house allows
you to correlate customer requirements against your technical specification. You should
examine each box in turn and insert a bold cross if it is strongly related and a normal
cross if there is a weak correlation. If there is not a correlation add nothing. The important
note here is no horizontal row should be empty. If it is empty then you have a technical
specification missing! Once you are happy with the central room you can go to any section
of the house, in any order.
So if we continue along the rows we enter the lean-to. In here we enter real numbers. If there
are competitors we create columns for each competitor and one for our new device. In here
we grade how well the competitors and our new device fit the customer requirements: 0 for
not at all and 100% for fully meeting the requirements. This area enables us to examine where
we can make improvements to create market differentiation. It can also help us to decide what
number should go into the basement. So, for example, if our competitors can only flip a photo
about a vertical axis we can make an improvement by flipping about a horizontal axis too.
Let us now go into the basement. In here we enter targets. Hence, although in the specification
it says all platforms, in here we specify which platforms. In the technical requirements it says
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