Ordering the Chaos: A Guided Translation of Needs into Product Requirements☆

Abstract The organization of customers’ needs and technical requirements in a QFD (Quality Function Deployment) often generates sparse relationship matrices. This entails several difficulties during early design process and collides with general design concepts as good balancing, order and symmetry. The diagonality of the matrix is, in fact, an index of the effectiveness of effective decomposition of needs and CTQs (Critical To Qualities) at an appropriate level of detail. The paper presents a step-by-step procedure aimed at guiding the designer for a correct translation of needs into product requirements. The peculiarity is that the method intervenes at the very early stage of VOC (Voice Of the Customer) translation into CTQs, unlike classical approaches that occurs in successive steps. The procedure consists of an iterative elaboration and re-organization of the information related to the radical innovation of complex products. A validation case, performed in collaboration with a manufacturing company operating in the automotive field, allowed to test the effectiveness of the procedure

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