EI2QFD - an integrated QFD approach or from the results of Eco-indicator 99 to quality function deployment

Companies today are focusing more and more on environmental issues. In doing so, some of them face the problem that environmental soundness does not automatically imply market success. Therefore, methodical support is necessary which integrates environmental and market issues in a product. One method capable of this is an Eco quality function deployment (Eco-QFD). A major drawback of QFD is the high effort needed to carry it out, which is even higher by an Eco-QFD. Therefore, an integrated approach called EI2QFD, which reduces the effort of carrying out an Eco-QFD, is presented in this paper. Within EI2QFD the environmental Houses of Quality are nearly automatically derived from the results of a rough assessment with Eco-indicator 99. Only for the use phase, the QFD Team has to manually carry out some steps and check the results. Finally, to support the QFD-Team in the decision-making, the results are illustrated in a strategy portfolio. A prototype of EI2QFD is implemented in a Microsoft-Excel-based program using Visual Basic scripts.