Basic Approach to Identification of Critical Technologies: Estimation of the Most Important Engineering Attributes of a Product

. This article justifies the importance of identification of critical technologies. Estimation of the most important engineering attributes using the project management approach, product lifecycles (PLC) and system engineering tools is considered to be the first important step before identification of critical technologies. Conventional system engineering instrument Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is emphasized as a basic tool. QFD consists of four phases (so called “Houses of quality”). The authors’ research showed that identification of critical technologies is possible during the second phase of QFD. The second phase must be initiated once the first phase is completed. The first phase possesses organizational and methodological disadvantages. Overcoming these disadvantages allowed the authors to propose an engineering technique named “Improved QFD” (IQFD). The authors describe the development process of the first PLC stage “concept development” of “Mayak” nanosatellite as a demonstration of IQFD functions: development of customer requirements, numeric fixing of correlations among engineering attributes in the House of Quality, utilization of determined weights of correlations during the final QFD ranking of each technical attribute. The IQFD ranking results are different from the QFD results. The analysis of the QFD and IQFD results and their comparison with an actual workflow of “Mayak” nanosatellite engineering verified and validated the correctness of the IQFD results and the inaccuracy of the QFD results.