Quality function deployment optimization with Kano's model

Abstract

In today's highly competitive market, customer demand is a critical factor in the product design process that faces companies across all industrial sectors. The ability to deliver product designs that meet customer needs while making the designs manufacturable at a competitive cost becomes a major advantage for companies to compete in the market. Thus, companies have adopted a number of methods and tools to effectively capture customer needs and hopefully incorporate these requirements into product design to meet customer needs and achieve higher customer satisfaction. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a well-known methodology for customer-oriented product design and development. However, traditional QFD analysis has confronted a major challenge in capturing and understanding customer needs accurately. Kano's model, which studies the nature of customer needs, provides a new way for QFD users to develop a better understanding of customer needs. This thesis presents a novel approach to integrating Kano's model into QFD for optimizing customer-oriented product design. It first applies the traditional Kano's model to collect and analyze primary customer data, then quantifies Kano's model by identifying relationship functions between customer needs and customer satisfaction, finally integrates both qualitative and quantitative results from Kano's model into QFD to formulate a mixed integer nonlinear programming model to optimize product design with the objective of maximizing customer satisfaction under cost and technical constraints. A case study concerning the notebook computer design is conducted to illustrate the application of the proposed approach.