INTEGRATION OF QFD AND DOE METHODOLOGIES FOR NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTION IN THE ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING ARENA

摘要

The process of identifying customer requirements and rapidly incorporating them into electronic products or services is paramount. Customer satisfaction is a key factor that governs the market share of electronics products. Manufacturers follow various strategies to identify customer requirements and to correctly translate them to define product or service related features. The techniques to include these features are then researched and finally, new or modified designs and related production processes are introduced. This paper focuses on the role of two concepts for product and process development. They are Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and the Design of Experiments (DOE). The two philosophies are often used independently to achieve specific targets within various domains of interest. QFD is an effective tool that is used to systematically identify and define the key technical targets starting from the knowledge of the overall customer requirements/complaints. DOE, on the other hand, is a tool that is used to identify the effect of multiple factors on a specific product characteristic. The results from this tool are often used to find the best values of a combination of the different factors that affect the product characteristic. This paper presents a strategy of interfacing the two tools of QFD and DOE to perform the following: 1) Quickly and accurately identify the key technical targets based on the requirements of the customers. 2) Identify all the factors in the design and manufacturing domains that are related to the technical targets. 3) Translate the technical targets into actual production specifications. The aforementioned ideas are constructed and presented based on a detailed review of the available literature.