گسترش کارکرد کیفیت همزمان (QFD) در گستره وب جهانی

Quality function deployment (QFD) is one of the formal techniques for effective product development. Its main purpose is to listen to the voice of the customer and deploy it down the stream of product development with minimum loss or distortion. It achieves this purpose by using a series of matrices. QFD is a team tool. However, most of computerized QFD systems are standalone and therefore offer limited support for teamwork. This paper proposes to employ the world wide web (WWW, web) technology to provide QFD services on the Internet/Intranets. The synchronized collaboration between team members distributed geographically and over time is particularly emphasized in this development. The resulting web-based QFD system requires no installation or maintenance on the client side but offers remote and simultaneous accesses and therefore supports better teamwork.

Over the last two decades or so, good design practices have been formalized into a suite of techniques and methods—design tools (Norell, 1993, Gill, 1990, Aranjo et al., 1996 and Huang, 1996). Examples include quality function deployment (QFD), functional analysis (as used in value analysis), failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA), and morphological chart analysis. On one hand, these methods are capable in problem analysis. On the other hand, they both require and nurture effective teamwork. However, members of a product development project team may well be distributed geographically and over time. Therefore, there are practical difficulties for them to come together to carry out analyses using these design tools. The standalone computerized design tools (Reinders, 1995) can help a little in this respect. The web technology has been proposed to deploy computerized design tools such as FMEA over the Internet or corporate Intranets (Huang, Mak, & Nie, 1998). Web-based design tools overcome many of the limitations that standalone systems suffer from. Team members can simultaneously access the system anywhere and any time from web browsers on the Internet. However, our previous developments did not consider the synchronization of the clients who are working on the same project. Therefore, decisions made by different clients may well be inconsistent and there are no mechanisms for tracking and resolving the conflicts. This paper focuses on the synchronization of team activities within a web-based design tool such as QFD. Because of limited space here, the implementation process and factors considered during the implementation are not repeated. Interested readers are encouraged to read our previous work (Huang and Mak, 2001 and Huang et al., 2000).

QFD is a team tool. The synchronization of project clients over the web provides an environment that team tools like QFD are used as such. Collaboration is much facilitated between team members distributed not only geographically but also over time. Project team members at different locations use web browsers to connect to the QFD web server at the same time to make simultaneous contributions from different points of view. They share the same working context. They see any changes instantly so that conflicts are identified, discussed and finally resolved among the project team. The initial insights gained from this pilot project on developing and implementing synchronized design tools on the Internet/Intranets using web browsers have encouraged the authors to extend the efforts to other applications such as design for X and FMEA.