Quality Function Deployment in Product Design

Quality Function Deployment is a structured method for translating customer requirements into specific engineering and design decisions, ensuring that what users actually want shapes a product from concept through production. Originally developed in Japanese manufacturing, it has expanded into service design, supply chain coordination, and strategic planning, often combined with fuzzy logic to handle the imprecision inherent in how people describe their needs. Researchers are actively working to improve how competing customer priorities are weighted and reconciled when resources are constrained, and how QFD frameworks can be scaled across complex, multi-tier supply chains without losing the fidelity of the original customer signal. An open challenge is integrating real-time market feedback and sustainability criteria into QFD processes that were designed for more static planning cycles.

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143,410

Keywords

Quality Function DeploymentQFDFuzzy LogicCustomer RequirementsProduct DesignStrategic Management