Abstract
Quality function deployment (QFD), a key tool to convert the customer needs into product features, is generally integrated into the New Product Development (NPD) process at the design stage. Prioritizing customer needs in a QFD process leads to using the resources (time, money, and staffing) effectively by eliminating the unimportant customer needs. The overall goal of the research was to develop a textile-based optical fiber sensor for automotive seat occupancy. The findings of this paper were focused on the design of experiments in our previous publication. In this paper, a research study was conducted to better understand market demands in terms of sensor performance characteristics for automotive seat weight sensors, as a part of the QFD House of Quality (HOQ) analysis. A survey was sent to more than 20 companies operating in the field of automotive seat weight sensors, and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) via e-mail. Only five companies participated in this study due to competitive concerns and confidentiality reasons. However, the companies responded to the survey were of quality relevant to the research and could be perceived as representative of the group of experts. All 5 companies participated in the survey agreed on the first 5 most important sensor characteristics: reproducibility, accuracy, selectivity, aging, and resolution, where The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to prioritize the sensor characteristics.
Highlights
The concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), as an approach to design of new products, was first proposed by Dr Yoji Akao in 1966 in Japan [1]
QFD can be described as a method that converts customer needs into product features by ensuring quality at each stage of the new product development (NPD) process [4,7,8]
The company claimed that automotive seat weight sensors were not used for real-time occupant discrimination and used a generally slower discrimination algorithm to avoid the effects of noise, and recovery and response times would not be critical attributes
Summary
The concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), as an approach to design of new products, was first proposed by Dr Yoji Akao in 1966 in Japan [1]. QFD can be described as a method that converts customer needs into product features by ensuring quality at each stage of the new product development (NPD) process [4,7,8]. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) developed by Saaty in the 1970s provides a more sufficient ratio-scale importance ranking approach to prioritize the customer needs [18,19].
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