The use of Quality - Function Deployment ( QFD ) for customer - focused Product Develop - ment

In today’s competitive business environment, it is extremely important to offer customers exactly the products they want. Mass Customization promises to enable companies to offer a large variety of products while still being able to manage the complexity caused by this increased number of products. But offering a large range of variants does not necessarily mean increased profits, as many manufacturing companies had to notice in the early 1990ies. Therefore, valuebased product development methods are necessary to ascertain a product portfolio that optimally satisfies customer demands and at the same time restricts the number of products offered. This paper describes how the well-established product development and quality management method Quality Function Deployment (QFD) can be used to identify customer segments, and using the importance ascribed to certain customer requirements as input, the right product variants needed to satisfy the customer segments identified are defined.