Cost engineering with quality function deployment

Conventional Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is technically one-sided. Pr ioritization of technical attributes, if carried out at all, attempts to ma ximize customer satisfaction without considering the costs incurred. Howeve r, product design is usually a techno-economic process, hence there is alwa ys a tradeoff between quality goals and limited budgets. Based on a priorit ization method suggested by Wasserman [1], this paper integrates design cos ts into the QFD framework. This proposed approach enables designers to opti mize product development resources towards customer satisfaction and conduc t analytical investigations to facilitate decision making in product design and development. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.