Under rapidly changing and highly competitive circumstances, the timely design, development and marketing of new products or services with creative and innovative features are essential for a company’s survival. In order to capture and retain market share, customer requirements and expectations should be met and exceeded through product innovation. For effective new‐product‐development project management, a systematic approach to understanding customer requirements and further embedding them into the future product is desirable. This paper analyses the notion of customer satisfaction based on the Kano model and points to the importance of product innovation in exceeding customer satisfaction. It further proposes an integrated process model for innovative product development by incorporating Kano’s model and the quality function deployment (QFD) technique. Analyses suggest that the proposed approach would contribute to the creation of attractive product attributes and product innovation.
Through listening to the voice of the customer, quality function deployment (QFD) is a systematic methodology for quality improvement and product development. The quality of a product or service is ultimately judged in terms of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction benchmarking can help decision makers identify areas for improvement, make strategic decisions, and set targets on desired satisfaction performance. The main purpose of this paper is to study procedures and methods for successful benchmarking in QFD for quality improvement. It discussed the customer satisfaction benchmarking process in QFD and proposed the use of hierarchical benchmarks for strategic competitor selection and decision making. A case study was presented to illustrate the use of this method. This paper may provide a road map to achieve world‐class performance through benchmarking in QFD, especially for small to medium‐sized enterprises or companies in developing countries.
Quality and innovation are two main issues involved in product development. When faced with increasingly intense competition from both national and international competitors, organisations usually consider quality and innovation as sources of competitive advantage. Customer satisfaction can be met and exceeded by providing customers with innovative products of high quality. Focusing on the early phases of product development, this paper suggests the combined use of quality function deployment and Kano's model. A case example is presented by employing the proposed method in a World Wide Web page design process. Customer requirements on Web pages were clearly recognised and deeply analysed. Also, further technical features were identified for delivering attractive Web pages. The results from the case example support the proposed framework as a means of innovative product development and attractive quality creation.
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