Planning customer requirements and engineering characteristics in avoiding product development quality risks

Product development is the process of bringing a new product to market. Quality function deployment is a product development tool to improve customer satisfaction, design the product quality and enhance competitiveness of the company in the market. In developing new products, we capture the requirements from the customer, and return it to the customer as a new product. Requirements and customer's language might be imprecise, causing inconsistent studied results and deviating of the voice of customer. These generally cause failure of a product development project. To improve quality in product development process, fuzzy set theory is employed in the product development phases. This model focuses on customer requirements and on engineering characteristics. The correlation between engineering requirements and benchmarking analysis, often ignored in most of QFD researches, are considered. Aiming to solve these problems, this paper aims to improve the precision of QFD first phase, and optimise and develop the customer requirements approach to reduce risks in subsequent phases.