Development the Product Design Process Using Quality Function Deployment and Operational Research

The product design process is an early stage of new product development that helps in improving the company competitiveness in the existing turbulent environment thus satisfying the markets requirements in terms of cost, quality and time. Old-fashioned techniques for satisfying the customer’s expectation are less effective in the modern markets due to constraints. Usually, the customer’s requirements are not satisfied by the available product design and it requires significant modification in order to satisfy the customer’s needs. This study involves highly systematic methods including quality function deployment (QFD) and operational research such as zero-one goal programming for enabling a design to be more compatible with future customers’ requirements. Firstly, the QFD team was established to determine the customer’s need and the relative importance of the requirements were achieved using ANP technique. Later, part planning was used as the second phase for designing and developing of a new product that helps the company to meet the technical requirements. In this phase, technical attributes of product are translated into the related key parts. Supplying the key parts of the product is a multi-objective decision making that need to be mathematically programmed. Traditional techniques seem to be ineffective for selecting the appropriate supplier for the related parts in order to optimize the product efficiency regards to the available constraint such as budget. Here, QFD concept was used for translating the technical attributes into the key parts using house of quality. Then, the priority of key parts was compared pairwise using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP).

Keywords:

Zero-one goal programming , Supplier selection , Qualityfunction deployment , Partplanning.