A Futuristic software framework to generate actual customer needs for quality funtion deployment

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a product development process that encompasses a sheer amount of data gathered from customers through several market research techniques like personal interview, focus groups, surveys, video conferencing etc. This massive, unsorted and unstructured data is required to be transformed into a limited number of structured information to represent the actual ‘Customer Needs’. However the process is tedious and time consuming and cannot be dealt with manually. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a futuristic software framework based on an Affinity Process. The paper begins with the topic introduction and outlines the QFD process. The paper then describes the Affinity Process, builds the data structure and then makes an attempt to build the proposed framework using tools Visual Basic (VB) and MS-Access. The proposed framework is developed as a part of QFD software and it is anticipated that when completely developed, it would act as a vital component of QFD software. Keywords: QFD, Affinity Process, Visual Basic, MS-Access, Software, Customer Needs.

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