House Of Quality For Mobile Phone: A Coopetition Analysis

Identify customer needs

Discuss about the Coopetition Strategy Market Performance.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) includes two major processes i.e. analyzing what will satisfy the needs and wants of customers and converting those needs into targeted design. House of quality is a diagrammatic tool for explaining the relationship between desires of customers and product capabilities. It is a map which offers the means for inter-functional communication and planning of customer needs and technical responses. It is a major component of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and its uses a planning matrix to related what the people wants to how a company is going to fulfill those requirements (Ross, 2017). Each and every organization develops House of Quality to provide the products and services with superior quality. The product that is taken into consideration for the discussion is mobile phone. To create the house of quality, fundamental seven steps are executed by every organization. These steps are given below:

It is the most important step in the process of building house of quality diagram for any product or service of company. First, the company will analyze the needs and demands of customers towards its products (Ross, 2017). The rating will be given to all the customer needs according to the response of customers towards products. There are some primary features which any customer desires in a mobile phone. These features are given below:

The table shows that battery longevity is the first feature that customers demand in their mobile phone. If the longevity of mobile phone will be better than it will have more demand (Dale, 2015). It is the most important and highest rated desire among customers. After that, people consider the pricing of mobile phones. They prefer to purchase the mobile phone with better longevity and affordable prices. The above table shows the desires and their importance rating according to the customers (Wilder, Collier, & Barnes, 2014).

At this step, the manager of company needs to reflect the desires and demands of customers into their company’s mobile phones. The mobile phone will be able to offer various excellent features to the customers (Franceschini, 2016). The needs of customers will be satisfied focusing on below points:

• Incorporating innovation in mobile phones
• Updated technology services and benefits
• Low cost labour
• Technological and technical assistance
• Training and development for employees
• Installation of less vulnerable components on mobile phones

Looking at the increased awareness among people, company will use different innovative specifications in its mobile phones. To offer the mobile phones on affordable prices, it will reduce the labor cost and other relative costs. The companies provide effective training and development to the staff so that they can install innovative and updated technology in mobile phones.

Identify how product will satisfy the customer needs

In this step, the mobile phone provider will develop the relationship matrix between their hows. There may be some cases in which ‘hows’ are related to each other. The below-given diagram shows the relationship between different ‘hows’ of mobile phone product. White circle shows the low relationship, pink shows medium relationship and blue circle is for indicating high relationship (Desai, Kartikeyan & Panchal, 2016). The relationship among all the wants and hows is indicated in the below table:

This step of house of quality diagram is longer and very difficult. After drawing the relationship matrix between customer wants and ‘hows’, firm determines the importance ratings for mobile phone offerings (Stüber, 2017).

The importance ratings for mobile phones are determined in the below table:

After that, the company will compare its features with the products of competing brands. For this, Nokia and Samsung are taken as examples. These two are the major players in international mobile phone industry. In this step, the firm will compare their mobile phone with others to get a more details about the mobile phone (Le Roy & Sanou, 2014). The competitors will be compared on the basis of the needs and wants of customers towards mobile phones. In this process, Nokia and Samsung will be rated as good (G), fair (F) and poor (P). These competitors will be compared on the basis of different technical attributes.

Technical attributes play an important role in the house of quality of mobile phones. Mobile phones are totally based on the updated technologies and innovation. In this step, the performance of a company and performance of competitors are determined and compared with one another. It will determine the customer wants and company’s hows towards the production mobile phones. In this way, the company will determine its technical attributes and check its performance with respect to the products of competitors (Dawar & Kothari, 2015).

House of quality is an important part of the QFD process which uses a matrix to relate the needs and wants of customers to the how it will satisfy those needs of customers (Martí Bigorra, & Isaksson, 2017). It looks like a house to which customer wants and features of products frame a major part and competitive analysis as its doorw1ay.

After completing the above steps, the final house of quality for mobile phone is stated below:

The companies can apply the quality function deployment to acquire more and more customers towards mobile phones. The above house of quality provides the idea that what needs and demands of customers will be satisfied by the organization. This matrix can assist in identifying the strengths and weaknesses (Cerit, Kucukyazici & Kalem, 2014). By enhancing the weaknesses, the competitiveness of products and services can be improved. The mobile phone of a company is compared with two major mobile phone providers i.e. Nokia and Samsung. The ratings are given to all the players on the basis of different variables like better longevity, after sale service, attractive design etc.

Conclusion

From the above analysis, it can be concluded that House of Quality is an important tool for any organization that adopts total quality management process to enhance the quality of its products and operations. Quality Function Deployment converts the requirements of customers into technical descriptors. Needs of customers are also known as voice of customers. The above report includes the house of quality for mobile phone. In today’s modern world, mobile phone is the basis need for all the people. So company needs to develop its products and their features considering the needs and demands of targeted customers. The above analysis concludes the people always seek for innovative and quality mobile phones at affordable prices. These are the major factors which mobile manufacturer needs to consider while developing products. The matrix of house of quality gives the details about the customer needs, descriptors, relationship between different variables, targeted value etc. It indicates the competitive analysis between current product and competitor’s product.

References

Cerit, B., Kucukyazici, G. & Kalem, G. (2014). Quality Function Deployment and Its Application on a Smartphone Design. Balkan Journal Of Electrical & Computer Engineering, 2 (2), 86-91.

Dale, B. (2015). Total quality management. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dawar, S., & Kothari, A. K. (2015). Impact of Technological Innovation on Marketing Mix of Mobile Phone Industry: A Systematic Review. Asian Journal of Research in Marketing, 4(4), 42-56.

Desai, Y., Kartikeyan, B., & Panchal, N. (2016). “Hows” of quality for remote sensing data user-A house of quality approach. International Journal of Geomatics and Geosciences, 6(3), 1708-1723.

Franceschini, F. (2016). Advanced quality function deployment. CRC Press.

Le Roy, F., & Sanou, F. H. (2014). Does coopetition strategy improve market performance? An empirical study in mobile phone industry. Journal of Economics & Management, 17, 63.

Martí Bigorra, A., & Isaksson, O. (2017). Combining customer needs and the customer’s way of using the product to set customer-focused targets in the House of Quality. International Journal of Production Research, 55(8), 2320-2335.

Ross, J. E. (2017). Total quality management: Text, cases, and readings. UK: Routledge.

Stüber, G. L. (2017). Principles of mobile communication (Vol. 3). Springer.

Wilder, K. M., Collier, J. E., & Barnes, D. C. (2014). Tailoring to customers’ needs: Understanding how to promote an adaptive service experience with frontline employees. Journal of Service Research, 17(4), 446-459.