A competitive advantage, generally, can be gained if a firm produces a product that not only addresses what the customer values most, but also performs better than its competitors in terms of quality, cost, and timeliness. However, these two factors, namely, the customer needs and competitors’ performance, change over time, and yet most product design processes seem to have oversimplified this fact. This paper aims to address this issue, that is, how the dynamics of these two factors along with their interaction can be integrated into a QFD analysis. This proposed methodology essentially comprises of two novel technical approaches. First, it is the use of an exponential smoothing based forecasting technique to model the trend of the importance rating values and the competitive benchmarking information. Second, it is a strength-weakness-opportunity-threat (SWOT) based competitive weighting scheme, which at the same time serves as a more systematic way to substitute the traditional QFD customer competitive target setting and sales point value determination.
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