Prioritization of product design tasks using QFD, TRIZ and DSM

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is widely used application utilized in many fields such as product design, manufacturing process design, and project development. It can convert customer requirements into a firm´s engineering characteristics which results to achievements showing great success and House of Quality (HOQ) is the manipulation tool for QFD. However, the consideration of correlation among engineering characteristics is often ignored in most of QFD application related researches. This usually affects the implementation sequence of the project tasks and results to delay or queuing in product design/project development. This paper presents a methodology based on Theory of Inventive Problems Solving (TRIZ), Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and the absolute importance of engineering characteristics in HOQ which deals with the weakness mentioned. An example is illustrated to evidence the proposed methodology.