Integrating consumer needs into product quality
using a quality function deployment (QFD)
approach: a literature review

Increase your rate of new product successes and reduce product development time by understanding and applying the techniques of quality function deployment.

Thousands of new food products are launched every year - and the majority of them fail. Product development is a costly exercise, so there are significant business advantages for a company to reduce the time it takes to convert new ideas into new products and to increase the proportion of its new products that are a commercial success. QFD (quality function deployment) provides a means of achieving this. It is a tool for taking into account what consumers want in a product. It enables consumer needs to be identified, prioritised and translated into measurable technical criteria upon which product development, manufacturing and marketing personnel can make informed judgements.

This review describes what QFD is and how it works. It reviews the existing scientific and technical literature relating to QFD and illustrates, by way of example, some of the ways QFD has been successfully exploited in the food industry.

Contents

• Introduction
• Product development today
• Today's consumer
  - Consumer patterns/product awareness
  - From product to marketplace
• Quality function deployment
  - Approaches to QFD
  - House of quality
  - Basic tools of QFD
  - Gathering customer information
  - Listening to the customer
  - Voice of the customer
  - Voice of the product developer
• Integrating consumer needs using QFD
• Examples of QFD in the food sector
• Discussion
• Terminologies and references