Improving the use of QFD with Axiomatic Design

Abstract

Concurrent engineering employs a set of functional disciplines to simultaneously perform the tasks that lead to a product satisfying a list of customer needs. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology that has been broadly used to listen to the voice of the customer. This article intends to improve the use of QFD in concurrent engineering by adoption of axiomatic design (AD) principles, namely the independence of functional requirements and the hierarchical decomposition following a zigzag path. The conclusion is that the inclusion of these AD concepts avoids multilevel iterations in the QFD approach, which can significantly reduce the lead time and costs.