A Hybrid QFD Framework for New Product Development

Nowadays, new product development (NPD) is one of the most crucial factors for business success. The manufacturing firms cannot afford the resources in the long development cycle and the costly redesigns. Good product planning is crucial to ensure the success of NPD, while the Quality Function deployment (QFD) is an effective tool to help the decision makers to determine appropriate product specifications in the product planning stage. Traditionally, in the QFD, the product specifications are determined by a rather sujective evaluation, which is based on the knowledge and experience of the decision makers. In this paper, the traditional QFD methodology is firstly reviewed. An improved Hybrid Quality Function Deployment (HEFD) is then presented to tackle the shortcomings of traditional QFD methodologies in determining the engineering characteristics. A structured questionnaire to collect and analyze the customer requirements, a methodology to establish a QFD record based and effective case retrieval, and a model to more objectively determine the target values of engineering characteristics are also described.