Design Decomposition in Quality Function Deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a cross-functional planning tool which ensures that the voice of the customer is systematically deployed throughout the product planning and design stages. One of the impediments to the adoption of QFD as a product design aid has been the large size of the design matrix, called a house of quality (HOQ) chart. This paper presents a formal approach to reducing the size of a HOQ chart using the concept of design decomposition combined with multiattribute value theory. The proposed approach aims to decompose a HOQ chart into smaller subproblems which can be solved efficiently and independently. The smaller size of the subproblems would make the QFD process simpler, easier, and cheaper. The decomposition algorithm proposed in this paper can also be applied to forming machine cells and part families in flexible manufacturing systems when the design incidence matrix is nonbinary with no diagonal structure and the column entities are correlated.