Synchronous quality function deployment (QFD) over world wide web

Quality function deployment (QFD) is one of the formal techniques for effective product development. Its main purpose is to listen to the voice of the customer and deploy it down the stream of product development with minimum loss or distortion. It achieves this purpose by using a series of matrices. QFD is a team tool. However, most of computerized QFD systems are standalone and therefore offer limited support for teamwork. This paper proposes to employ the world wide web (WWW, web) technology to provide QFD services on the Internet/Intranets. The synchronized collaboration between team members distributed geographically and over time is particularly emphasized in this development. The resulting web-based QFD system requires no installation or maintenance on the client side but offers remote and simultaneous accesses and therefore supports better teamwork. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.