Strategic use of quality function deployment (QFD) in the construction industry

In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine the applicability of QFD as a strategic decision-making tool after the construction stage of a housing project to determine the best marketing strategy, to make a comparison between the performances of different competitors and to transfer the experience gained from the current project to the forthcoming projects. For this purpose, a QFD team has been formed to collect and verify the expectations of the customer profile of the sample project, which was a high-rise building project located in Ankara, Turkey. The case study findings demonstrated that QFD could be successfully applied in the housing projects as a strategic tool to facilitate marketing decisions. As a result of extensive literature review and the case study observations; the paper also points out the limitations and breakthroughs of the QFD methodology. Finally, critical success factors are proposed to improve the performance of the QFD methodology in construction projects.