A FRAMEWORK FOR COMBINING SUSTAINABILITY CRITERIA WITH STAKEHOLDER REQUIREMENTS AT THE EARLY STAGE OF PRODUCT IDEA GENERATION PROCESS

Quality function deployment (QFD) is effective and a very useful analysing tool in product design and development process. The determination of the fulfilment levels of customer needs and engineering characteristics is an important issue during QFD process for development of new product concept. To solve the uncertainty in QFD as well as to tackle the vague nature of product development processes, numerous researchers have applied the fuzzy set theory to QFD. This paper describes an approach where computer aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) and design for environment (DFE) integration was deployed and using fuzzy QFD tool, product sustainable actions were prioritised. The feasibility of deploying CAD/CAE and DFE tools for achieving effectiveness in the product development process through a real case has been ensured. Finally, application of the fuzzy QFD logic is considered to be highly valuable to translate linguistic judgements required for relationships and correlations matrixes into numerical values.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one method for developing customer-oriented products. QFD is a planning process that helps the organization plan to implement various technical support tools effectively and complement each other to prioritize each problem. House of Quality (HOQ) is a tool from QFD that is used to determine design boundaries, shows the relationship between respondent needs and the matrix to satisfy the needs of respondents and illustrates the focus of the design team to produce quality products. The paper’s purpose is to review the QFD literature based on references that have been collected about the history of the development of the QFD method and the application of QFD in product design and development. Planning for process quality is a very important technique for managing the quality of the product during the product development process. Done to expand processes and adequate process capabilities aimed at producing products. Since Japanese academics and industry began 3 decades more than have passed to formalize QFD techniques in 1960 and 1970. Because of the effectiveness in quality management and product expend, QFD applications have been widely used.

In the product design and development process, quality function deployment (QFD) provides a comprehensive, systematic approach to ensure that new products meet or exceed customer expectations. This paper reports on the results of a survey of more than 400 companies in the United States and Japan using QFD. The objective of the study was to understand the key factors that result in the successful application of QFD. The research questions investigated in this study were developed both inductively from QFD case studies in the United States and Japan and deductively from the literature. Regression analysis estimates the effects of organizational characteristics, data sources, and QFD tools and techniques on QFD improvements in the product and process. The results show that QFD is most likely to have a positive impact when there is management support for QFD and new customer data specifically collected for the QFD study are used. The benefits of QFD are independent of the tools and techniques used as part of the QFD study.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) starts and ends with the customer. other words, how it ends may depend largely on how it starts. Any QFD practitioners will start with collecting the voice of the customer that reflects customer’s needs as to make sure that the products will eventually sell or the service may satisfy the customer. On the basis of those needs, a product or service creation process is initiated. It always takes a certain period of time for the product or service to be ready for the customer. The question here is whether those customer-needs may remain exactly the same during the product or service creation process. The answer would be very likely to be a ‘no’, especially in today’s rapidly changing environment due to increased competition and globalization. The focus of this thesis is placed on dealing with the change of relative importance of the customer’s needs during product or service creation process. other words, the assumption is that there is no new need discovered along the time or an old one becomes outdated; only the relative importance change of the existing needs is dealt with. Considering the latest development of QFD research, especially the increasingly extensive use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in QFD, this thesis aims to enhance the current QFD methodology and analysis, with respect to the change during product or service creation process, as to continually meet or exceed the needs of the customer. The entire research works are divided into three main parts, namely, the further use of AHP in QFD, the incorporation of AHP-based priorities’ dynamics in QFD, and decision making analysis with respect to the dynamics. The first part focuses on the question In what ways does AHP, considering its strength and weakness, contribute to an improved QFD analysis? The usefulness of AHP in QFD is demonstrated through a case study in improving higher education quality of an education institution. Furthermore, a generalized model of using AHP in QFD is also proposed. The generalized model not only provides an alternative way to construct the house of quality (HoQ), but also creates the possibility to include other relevant factors into QFD analysis, such as new product development risks. The second part addresses the question How to use the AHP in QFD in dealing with the dynamics of priorities? A novel quantitative method to model the dynamics of AHP-based priorities in the HoQ is proposed. The method is simple and time-efficient. It is especially useful when the historical data is limited, which is the case in a highly dynamic environment. As to further improve QFD analysis, the modeling method is applied into two areas. The first area is to enhance the use of Kano’s model in QFD by considering its dynamics. It not only extends the use of Kano’s model in QFD, but also advances the academic literature on modeling the life cycle of quality attributes quantitatively. The second area is to enhance the benchmarking part of QFD by including the dynamics of competitors’ performance in addition to the dynamics of customer’s needs. The third part deals with the question How to make decision in a QFD analysis with respect to the dynamics in the house of quality? Two decision making approaches are proposed to prioritize and/or optimize the technical attributes with respect to the modeling results. Considering the fact that almost all QFD translation process employs the relationship matrix, a guideline for QFD practitioners to decide whether the relationship matrix should be normalized is developed. Furthermore, a practical implication of the research work towards the possible use of QFD in helping a company develop more innovative products is also discussed. brief, the main contribution of this thesis is in providing some novel methods and/or approaches to enhance the QFD’s use with respect to the change during product or service creation process. For scientific community, this means that the existing QFD research has been considerably improved, especially with the use of AHP in QFD. For engineering practice, a better way of doing QFD analysis, as a customer-driven engineering design tool, has been proposed. It is hoped that the research work may provide a first step into a better customer-driven product or service design process, and eventually increase the possibility to create more innovative and competitive products or services over time.

The growing emphasis on sustainable product development systems from the need to address environmental, social, and economic challenges associated with traditional production processes. This study is motivated by the integrating sustainability into product design and operations, using emerging technologies to enable data-driven decisions, optimise resource use, and improve supply chain transparency. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) translates customer needs into design features that align with sustainability goals. This research conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of journal articles published between 2012 and 2023, focusing on the application of QFD in sustainable product development, specifically in the agro-industrial sector. A total of 39 scientific papers were sourced from Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed databases and analysed using VOS viewer. The study aims to identify how QFD and other methods support sustainable product development by linking design features to sustainability goals. The results reveal strong correlations between key themes ‘sustainability’, ‘QFD’, and ‘new product development’ demonstrating the potential of QFD to drive sustainable innovation. The findings are presented in both quantitative and qualitative formats, illustrated through article overview diagrams, keyword analysis visualisations, and trends in QFD integration. These insights provide a useful reference for agro-industrial companies aiming to integrate sustainability into product development.

The relationship between system theory and the product design, the process of product development has been described. It compared the merits and demerits of serial and parallel product development processes and, with the guidelines of system theory, put forward and analyzed the planning actions and corresponding necessity existed in the indistinct initial phase in product development process. It also analyzed the optimizing effect of planning actions in product design & development process. Thus, it obtained the model of product design & development process based on system theory so as to clarify the indistinct initial phase, shorten product development time and, improve the effectiveness of enterprise's product development.

Conjoint analysis (CA) is a popular marketer's tool for new product design. Quality function deployment (QFD) is another approach, frequently used by engineers, for design of new product. Typically, in a conjoint study, the attributes and their levels are determined through focus group discussion or market survey. On many occasions, the researchers leave out some of the more critical features altogether or include attributes with unrealistic sets of levels resulting in infeasible product profiles. In QFD, on the other hand, the new product development team attempts to identify the technical characteristics (TCs) that should be improved or included to meet the customer requirements (CRs) by using a subjective relationship matrix between CRs and TCs. QFD is not used to determine the attributes and their levels. As a result, more often than not, QFD captures what product developers think would best satisfy customer needs. In this paper, we link QFD with conjoint and propose a framework for objectively determining the attribute levels using the QFD approach for subsequent use in a conjoint study. For this purpose we obtain the so-called relationship matrix in QFD in a particular way that facilitates achieving our objective. We formulate an integer-programming problem for maximising the weighted sum of improvements in the product, subject to budgetary constraint and minimum percentage improvement for each or some of the attributes. We apply the framework for a commercial vehicle design problem with hypothetical data.

Exploration of Product Design Mode under Low-carbon Concept

Gold kiwifruit leather product development using Quality function deployment approach

Sustainable Manufacturing based Decision Support Model for Product Design and Development Process

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a powerful tool for quality planning in product design. In the course of time, the QFD method has passed over several improvements and adaptations to meet specific requests of particular working environments. The current needs and challenges in developing radical innovative and life-cycle optimised products require a concurrent approach of product planning against a complex set of objective functions (e.g. quality, cost, assembly, manufacturing, environment, technology, service, disposal, etc.). An advanced form of QFD that integrates concepts of concurrent engineering for planning product development with respect to multi-objective functions is presented in this paper. This framework is called Concurrent Multifunction Deployment (CMFD). TRIZ method was initially exploited to determine the appropriate vectors of intervention in formulating the CMFD methodology. A systematic algorithm supports the CMFD deployment process. It takes into account results from the analysis, innovation and evaluation phases over the product design process, too, ensuring a superior integration of the planning activities within the product development process.

Product design and selection using fuzzy QFD and fuzzy MCDM approaches

Posits that advocates of quality function deployment (QFD) claim that it leads to better product designs, lower product costs, and shorter development times. Presents a study which aims to learn if organizations that apply QFD to product development achieve these benefits. Data from a survey of 80 QFD projects undertaken by 40 firms are used to examine these critical relationships. When leaders from these project teams were asked to compare results from product development efforts without QFD to results with QFD, they claimed that product designs and customer satisfaction improved significantly with QFD. Product costs and time‐to‐market showed only modest improvements. Benefits in time and costs may increase as QFD teams get better training and more experience. Describes the development and costing of a model of QFD implementation issues, product development outcomes, and customer satisfaction. Concludes that QFD’s implementation issues, specifically the organizational dimensions, have a significant impact on product design outcomes and resource consumption.

Increased competition, spiralling costs and vocal customers have made it imperative that every organisation should upgrade its processes constantly to stay ahead of the competition. Product design and development (PDD) is a techno-economic process, hence there is always a trade-off between design goals and cost constraints. Quality function deployment (QFD) is becoming a widely used customer-oriented approach and tool in product design. Target costing (TC) is a strategic tool for planning that takes a holistic view of products and their sub-assemblies, and identifies the opportunities for cost reduction and product improvement. Value engineering (VE) is essentially a process which uses function-cost analysis to reduce cost. This paper attempts to merge these diverse tools of customer-orientation, financial consideration and value creation, thus integrating TC and VE into QFD framework. The suggested methodologies aim at facilitating cross-functional PDD, integrating both organisational and functional aspects of the development process so as to maximise value creation. A case study has been discussed and issues of implementation of this cross-disciplinary approach from the perspective of an entrepreneur by selecting a consumer product are highlighted.

QFD (Quality Function Deployment) and TRIZ (a Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) have been each one separately and thoroughly studied by authors. However, integrating both techniques QFD and TRIZ effectively for technology innovation and new product development (NPD) process remains still less explored. Using QFD and TRIZ, for new product design, is one of the best ways to meet the challenge of satisfying customers' inconstant demands and then to thrive in business. In this article we tend to describe a process which systematically integrates QFD with TRIZ and enable the effective and systematic creation of technology innovation for new products. Finally, the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was introduced to demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of that integration.