Applications of QFD within a concurrent engineering environment

Companies needing to establish competitive advantage must ensure their products are brought to market quickly, with the quality features sought by potential customers. Concurrent Engineering techniques can reduce time scales, but quality issues are more difficult, as customers’ needs are not readily available to the project team throughout the design process, so design effort may focus on satisfying a functional specification, imperfectly translated from customer requirements, rather than on satisfying the real customer needs as perceived in the market. The research reported here demonstrates how a Concurrent Engineering environment and Quality Function Deployment techniques can be brought together to provide an extended design team with valuable, shared information throughout the design process.