Quality driven product development

This paper describes an alternative approach to innovation and product development called the synergistic management approach. In this approach, current methodologies such as quality function deployment (QFD), target costing (TC), and value engineering (VE) are utilized to facilitate cross-functional product design and development, integrating both organizational and functional aspects of the development process so as to maximize value creation. This approach has the potential to attain reduced cycle time compared with the current sequential approach and also improved feasible designs yielding higher customer satisfaction. This paper demonstrates this cross-functional approach using a small company that produces a voltage regulator of 500 VA.