A Quality Function Deployment Methodology for Product Development

A constant challenge for any fast paced industry, such as consumer electronics, is the very short technology life span needed to successfully take a product from conception to market while staying competitive with other industry leaders. There are also a wide variety of customers and market segments. Incorporating these factors into a single product design while maintaining a competitive development cycle is both challenging and time consuming. Customer input is gathered through marketing surveys, market research and previous product feedback. Implementing this paper adds to the overall product lead time due to the difficulty of gathering and analyzing the data. This lead time can be reduced by creating a method to process the voice of the customer for direct use in the development cycle. In the consumer electronics industry (similar to other fast paced industries), there are 3 basic types of customers: "early technology adopter", "general consumer", and "last to market" (Rogers, 1962). Currently corporations target either a single customer type with their product family, or choose to make a range of products to meet, hopefully, the needs of each of these types. In a survey of the literature, there are no documented end to- end methods for interpreting and applying marketing survey data (that is generalized and not targeted towards a specific group) and producing product/feature sets that reflect the needs of each customer group that can be input directly into the quality function deployment process. This paper will present an end-to-end process that can take a product concept, gather and analyze customer marketing data, create a product profile/feature set, and use input from the cross functional teams to maximize the end quality, and customer satisfaction. This tool would be extendable to any "fast paced" industry, such as the consumer electronics industry, and reduce development costs lead time, reduce internal decision time, turn qualitative into quantitative reasoning. The following literature review will show the previous research in areas of product development and quality function deployment related to the goal of this paper.

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