It is extremely important to translate the Voice of the Customer into the Voice of the Designer. The method to do this is called Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a highly structured and very effective approach for converting customer needs into design requirements. The secret to QFD’s success is that it establishes design requirements that are:

• Measurable (quantifiable)—so you can tell if you met them.

• Solution-independent, meaning the requirements aren’t linked to predefined solutions that the design team might have in mind (allowing for much greater creativity).

• Directly correlated to customer needs, so you know that you’re addressing issues that are important to customers.

• Easy to understand.To achieve these goals, QFD walks through a series of steps:

1) Identifying customer needs from the VOC data.

2) Prioritizing those needs.

3) Establishing design requirements that address all customer needs.

4) Prioritizing the design requirements (to focus the design effort).

5) Establishing performance target.Problem StatementIn the process of designing a child’s car seat, if you know that the very basic customer requirements are:

• Meeting the government regulations.

• Comfort to the child.

• Easiness of use.Also, (cushion, frame, and belt) of the child’s car seat were the basic technical requirements/ capabilities the company could use to address the mentioned above customer requirements.You are required to conduct QFD analysis for the child’s car seat, and to discuss the results you obtain.

• Start by listing the functionalities/requirements the customers want. For each of the three predefined requirements try to address as many sub-requirements as you can, in other words ask your self what could possibly be required to achieve each of the already defined requirements. Do the same for the technical requirements part.

• As going through the QFD process, methodically fill in the House of Quality piece by piece.

• Do more research on QFD, before trying to write a draft solution to the problemstatement.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

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