Planning Extent of Change in Improvement Design by Utilizing Information on Quality Function Deployment

Abstract

Recently, most of new products are realized as improvement design, which is characterized by rather limited changes to past generation products. By reusing verified and experienced components of the past, design of new product can be accelerated and reliable. However, some products increasingly become so complex that changes to some components propagates unpredicted changes to other components. Due to the unpredicted changes, it becomes more difficult for companies to benefit from the advantages of improvement design. Lack of holistic understanding of product leads to unpredicted propagation of changes and causes delay and budget overrun. Therefore, a change plan should be preliminary deliberated before the embodiment design is initiated. This paper proposes a design planning method for improvement design based on extended house of quality, which is employed in quality-function-deployment. In the proposed method, design solutions are evaluated in two aspects; opportuneness and drawback risk. Change planning is dealt as to determine parts to be redesigned in the tradeoff between opportuneness and drawback risk. A case study on a design of a solar boat demonstrates the application of the proposed method and verified its validity.