Quantification and integration of Kano’s model into QFD for customer-focused product design

ABSTRACT

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a systematic method for customer-driven product design. Despite its advantages, QFD has a problem in its assumption regarding the relationship between customer satisfaction and the fulfillment of customer requirements. Kano’s model explains very well customer requirements and their impacts on customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, Kano’s model is not as systematic as QFD for the relationship between customer requirements and satisfaction but is often qualitative. The integration of both methods can help address their individual problems to better understand customer needs for product design. This study presents a new approach to quantify and integrate Kano’s model into the QFD. This approach analyzes customer requirements based on Kano’s model by quantifying the relationship between customer requirements and satisfaction. The level of importance is more accurately calculated for each customer requirement. Both qualitative and quantitative results of Kano’s model can be integrated into the QFD. Potentially promising quality attributes that are often ignored can be effectively addressed. A case is demonstrated to show the effectiveness of this approach with automobile interior design.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality function deployment (QFD)
• customer requirements
• customer satisfaction
• new product development (NPD)
• car interior design
• S-CR+ relationship functions

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2019R1F1A1058577).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ulugbek Abdumalikovich Kirgizov

Ulugbek Abdumalikovich Kirgizov received the BS degree in Land Transport Facilities from Tashkent Automobile And Road Construction Institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and is pursuing graduate study in Operations Management at the Pusan National University School of Business, Busan, Korea. Prior to his graduate study, he had worked as a Supply Quality Engineer at General Motors Uzbekistan.

Choonjong Kwak

Choonjong Kwak is currently a Professor of Operations Management in the School of Business at Pusan National University, Busan, Korea. He received the BS degree in Industrial Engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea and the MS degree in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. After being a Ph.D. candidate with a doctorate dissertation fellowship in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, he completed his PhD in Industrial Engineering at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, while working as a manager at Samsung. He has published more than 40 research articles in peer reviewed journals such as International Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Production Economics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and so forth.