Goal-programming approaches to the QFD planning process
Abstract
Quality is often defined as consistently meeting or exceeding customers' needs and expectations. QFD is probably the most important tool that is ever developed to assure quality in new products and services. QFD is a structured approach to seek out customers, understand their needs, and ensure the needs of the customers are met. QFD is also concerned with benchmarking against the world class competitors to ascertain which customer requirements should be given higher priority. The prioritized customer requirements then can be used to prioritize the most important design elements. Even though the goal of a QFD planning effort is to maximize customer satisfaction, due to the limited resources, the number and the extend of the possible design features which can be incorporated into a product is limited. Therefore, knowing how to make tradeoffs in the selection of design features which most effectively meet customers' needs based on the given resources is of utmost importance. In this regard, this paper introduces a decision model which provides an objective basis for selecting design requirements subject to cost and other organizational constraints.