INGENIEUR
Various design approaches and innovative tools
have been developed which are helpful in meeting
quality improvement objectives of TC. These
include:
i. Quality Function Deployment or QFD (Mitsubishi
Kobe Shipyard, 1972) – also known as house
of quality. It relates customer or market
needs to high level internal technical design
requirements using a planning matrix as shown
in Figure 2.
The purpose of matrix is to show clearly and
concisely the data needed to make decisions
regarding product definition (customer needs),
design attributes, relevant manufacturing
processes and delivery. This is illustrated in
Figure 2;
Matrix 1 – House of quality. – Translating
customer requirements into technical
attributes.
Matrix 2 – Converting technical attributes into
characteristics or functions of major parts of
the product.
Matrix 3 – Converting characteristics of major
parts into the process to produce these parts.
Matrix 4 – Integrating characteristics of the
production process into detailed manufacturing
procedures and control methods.
ii. Value engineering or VE (Miles, 1961) –
analysing product value and creating the right
product function(s) that can excite the customer.
iii. Lean Product Design or LPD (Oh, 2011) which
consists of seven design steps to seek out
and eliminate wasted or excessive design
features, hence increasing product value,
reducing cost and speeding up product
design. Figure 3 shows the roadmap for Lean
Product Design.
It was reported that one of the major
electronic companies in the country has
enjoyed 23% reduction in target cost by
consistently implementing the lean product
design approach.
iv. Design for Manufacture or DFM and Design
for Assembly or DFA (Boothroyd & Dewhurst,
1987) - design concepts to achieve the
manufacturability and ease of assembly of
Figure 2: QFD (House of Quality) and information flow
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VOL 61 JANUARY – MARCH 2015
VOL 55 JUNE 2013