ctq is used to?

I’m thinking a Venn diagram where VOC is one circle, risk is another, and strategic imperatives is a 3rd might be helpful here. There will be an area of overlap – do those first. Then evaluate the other items with the most overlap.

In short, just be cause you can (or you’ve been asked to), doesn’t mean you should.

Here are some other thoughts:

VOC or VOX and risk items (like those resulting from a FMEA) be weighted independently. After all, no business has infinite resources to attack items.

One school of thought is that ROI should drive prioritization. And that can be true in a sense. But you can also go broke chasing all items.

Personally, I favor filtering all demands and requirements as follows:

The kitchen manager looks over the list of equipment that will be needed for the new kitchen to be set up. The manager then tells the owner, “Well, I know that some of this equipment will be needed regardless of what you are serving to your customers, but the rest will definitely be impacted by your decisions as to your menu, and the level of quality you are trying to establish.”

The kitchen manager continues his questions, asking: Do you see speed as a prime requirement? Quality of ingredients and method of preparation will also impact the required equipment list. Also, the breath of your menu will impact the different types of equipment and quantity of equipment we need to install.

So, what are you trying to set up here with your new restaurant? What requirements will be critical to quality?

Critical to quality, also known by the acronym CTQ, are the key attributes of a product or service that your customers have defined as being important. These measurable characteristics are what helps us understand what steps in our process are value-added, as these critical to quality characteristics help define the value.

To understand value-added and non-value added, we must first understand what the customer values, so we need to identify and prioritize who our customers are, and collect the VOC, or voice of the customer data. Using this data, we then determine the list of CTQ requirements.

A common tool used to prioritize a specific requirement is called a CTQ tree. This tool helps take customer requirements, which often start off broad, and turn them into performance requirements that can be measured.

In the example of kitchen equipment, the menu the owner is trying to establish, as well as the level of quality of the food, will directly impact the kitchen equipment required. So, if this was a fine dining establishment that served crème brule, the kitchen would require a brulee torch for the hardening of the top of the dish. If the restaurant is a burger joint, a brulee torch would likely be useless.

The kitchen manager must understand the customer needs before setting up a kitchen that can meet those needs. Maybe they are making hundreds of crème brulee a day, for delivery to local shops, so a traditional crème brulee torch would not be practical, and some automatic machine that can harden the tops of thousands of crème brulee a day is required.

All the characteristics from the customer are needed to establish what is critical to quality.

A CTQ for the making of the crème brulee might look like the example below:

The CTQ tree helps take the initial customer desires and turn them into measurable deliverables.

Before you feel tempted to shrug off this step, deeming it unnecessary, consider a few key ways it can benefit you to consider what is critical to quality.

If you don’t know the characteristics that make up your customer’s products or services, how can you be expected to make your customer happy on a regular basis? Knowing the CTQ information makes it possible to understand value, eliminate non-value-added activities, and satisfy your customer.

When you do not understand the CTQ, you are bound to fail to meet your customers’ requirements, and thus your process will require rework. When you’ve established the metrics using your CTQ trees, you can spot your quality errors sooner, decreasing the cost of rework.

Less rework also means less time spent performing the rework and less time trying spent apologizing to the customer regarding errors.

Usually, the deeper the better, as the customer will not always understand what they are asking for until they realize they forgot to ask for an important feature.

Going back to the example CTQ tree, the requirement on the mechanical lowering of the beater blades into the mixing bowl did not state how far into the bowls the beaters have to descend. If the beaters only lower two inches into the bowl, they may not mix the custard well enough. Going back and asking for a measurement would be advisable. Other requirements, such as how “oval” does the oval dishes need to be, may not be a critical factor.

It can be a challenge to separate a nice-to-have feature from a critical necessary characteristic. It can be helpful to use your information from the VOC, or Voice of the Customer, to help determine criticality for each element.

One tool worth considering is the quality function deployment (QFD) tool. This is a methodology that assists with transferring information from the VOC and transforming it into CTQ, including assigning priority actions required to meet key attributes.

Critical to Quality (CTQ) Trees (as shown in figure 1, below) are diagram-based tools that help you to develop and deliver high-quality products and services. You can use them to translate broad customer needs into specific, actionable and measurable performance requirements.