Applications and extensions of quality function deployment

Abstract

PurposeThe paper aims to review the fundamental concept of quality function deployment (QFD) and discusses the fact that a road to success for a new product development is the identification of customers' requirements and their conversion into engineering design requirements. Thereafter, it seeks to review the subject and to study four new cases on the topic of QFD.Design/methodology/approachThe paper discusses key elements of QFD and the fact that the vision for the development of a comprehensive quality system can be built upon the principles of QFD taking customer requirements into consideration and relating that to the design requirements.FindingsTo make product development task successful and bringing competitive advantages to the core business, management must be committed to the needs of the customers through marketing surveys and implementing that into the process of product development by converting them into engineering design requirements.Practical implicationsThe method has been used successfully in practice in areas such as: facility locations, marketing strategies, robot selection, ERP selection, software development, and sports.Originality/valueThe paper reviews QFDs, and its extensions such as fuzzy QFD, analytic hierarchy process, analytic network process and QFD, statistically extended QFD, dynamic QFD, and other extensions of that. In addition to that, cases covering topics of: ship of quality, cost‐design parameter modeling, enhanced version of the quality function development, financial factors and uncertainties in the product design process with fuzzy formulation, and a model for prioritizing and designing rule changes for the game of soccer, are also reviewed.