ABSTRACT
Many firms realize that getting high-quality products to customers in a timely manner is crucial for their survival in a competitive marketplace. Product development process is a complex managerial process that involves multifunctional groups with different points of view as we have seen in the previous chapters. Quality function deployment (QFD) is an innovative tool that stresses cross-functional integration and provides a means of translating product requirements into design specifications [Sullivan, 1986; Hauser and Clausing, 1988; Akao, 1990; Pahl and Beitz, 1996; Ertas and Jones, 1993; Cohen, 1995; Franceschini and Rossetto, 1998; Franceschini, 1998].
