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1. Introduction
Quality function deployment (QFD) was proposed by Japanese quality management scholars Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno in the early 1970s, and has been widely applied in the world wide. QFD can transform customer requirements (CRs) to engineering characteristics (ECs) in product design and development and further to the remainder processes of the production and delivery processes, i.e. production process development, manufacturing, logistics (Akao, 2012). The tool of QFD looks like a house and is also called as house of quality (HOQ). The CRs and their weights are located in the left wall; the ECs and the interrelationships between each pair of ECs are located in the top roof; the relationship matrix between CRs and ECs is located in the center; the competitive evaluation of CRs is located in the right wall; the competitive evaluation of ECs is located in the basement. There are six basic steps for building the HOQ, i.e. step (1) identify CRs and determine their weights, step (2) identify ECs, step (3) relate CRs to ECs, step (4) conduct an evaluation of competing products or services, step (5) evaluate ECs and develop targets, step (6) determine which ECs to deploy in the remainder of the production and delivery processes (Evans and Lindsay, 2011). In step 5, the priorities of CRs can be transformed to the weights of ECs through a multiplication operation with the relationship matrix between CRs and ECs. The priorities of ECs are the targets of ECs to be deployed in the remainder processes, and can be decided according to the weights of ECs, the competitive evaluations and the interrelationships analysis among ECs. The sequence of the above 6 steps was understood as the forward process in QFD.
The priorities of ECs decided by QFD will be deployed in the remained process. However, due to the limited resources in the remainder process, some priority ECs may not be completely supported. In these cases, how the targeted CRs would be realized in the new design needs to be examined. Usually, market research can be used to check the CRs satisfaction degree of newly designed products. However, this approach tends to incur substantial time costs, thereby hindering the expeditious pace of new product development for enterprises. Meanwhile, this approach makes...