What is a Critical to Quality Tree

4-5 minutes

The critical to quality trees (also known as customer requirement trees) are the key measurable characteristics of a product or process whose performance standards or specification limits must be met to satisfy the customer, i.e. A Car door sound when closing might be a CTQ tree, while the dimensional tolerances and cushioning needed to produce those conditions are CTQ’s for the automaker.

CTQ trees are often used as part of a six sigma methodology to help the manufacturer to provide superior quality products to customers. In short, the CTQ Tree is a simple tool to tell you exactly what your customer wants.

CTQ trees are very helpful in this regard as they define quality from the customer’s point of view. A most excellent approach is to design a CTQ tree for every singular need, as it results in a thorough and complete list of demands and requirements that are required to provide a superior quality product for customer satisfaction

. In this article, we will review a CTQ tree example and explain how it can improve your business.

Benefits of CTQ

CTQ helps to identify the solitary needs of the individual client and recognize measurable performance requirements needed for specific client’s satisfaction.
CTQ highlights any weak areas in an organization where performance is below standard and helps in root cause analysis.
CTQ helps in the quality improvement of a product or service.

Components of A CTQ Tree

CTQ tree is build up with the following three main components to ensure you get a useful level of detail.

Need: It highlights the customer requirements and it is the origin of a CTQ tree. For example, for a fast-food restaurant, customer’s need is fast food.

What does your customer need?
What does your product have to do or give them?

Driver: Drivers are the parameters on which a customer judges the quality of the product.

What’s important to the customer to satisfy their needs?
What qualities are important regarding the customer to need?

Requirements: These are the measurable performance standards that have to be met by drivers to satisfy customers. It helps the business to measure the quality of a product and/or service that has met the client’s demands.