A customer-driven quality function deployment approach for intelligent product design: A case of automatic-dishwasher

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one of the very effective customer-driven product development tools. With automatic dishwashers entering the Chinese market, manufacturers can use QFD to develop products that meet the unique Chinese customer requirements and explore the Chinese market. To help manufacturers maximize profits by developing automatic dishwashers to China’s market situation and competitive environment, this paper proposes an improved QFD model considering competitive learning and cost analysis based on market information analysis with Product Life Cycle (PLC) theory. On the one hand, the improved QFD model determines the life cycle stage of the product by analyzing the characteristics of the market. The improvement rate of customer requirements (CRs) determined by competitive learning in different stages has different influence on the importance weights of CRs, so that the new products developed based on design requirements (DRs) converted from CRs can better adapt to the current market environment. On the other hand, the cost strategy will also change according to different PLC stages. In cost analysis, different cost criteria weights will be determined in different life cycle stages to deal with product development risks in different market environments and help enterprises achieve better sustainable development. Finally, we take Chinese HE company’s automatic-dishwasher design as an example to show the specific application of the proposed model. The proposed model identifies the important DRs and their relative importance ranking for the product development. Comparison with existing QFD models shows the ranking obtained through the model is better integrated with market information, enabling the development of products that are better suited to the market, and helping companies to achieve sustainable development.