Discipline : Business and Enterprise Title of the abstract : QFD and the Environment

This paper identifies the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) as a tool in eco-design that can be used to identify customer desires, needs and requirements and to evaluate and characterise them into different categories, thereby building up an overall picture of customer value. It further argues that QFD can be more effective to the extent that it incorporates green engineering objectives, because it can incorporate sustainable environmental advantages into the existing set of sustainable competitive advantages that have been determined through the QFD implementation process. In this way, environmental competencies can also operate as sources of value or uniqueness, and as barriers to imitation in guaranteeing sustainable competitive advantage.