A study of optimized customer-driven design chain-case of molding industry

The importance of product innovation is increasing as the international competition environment becomes volatile. Effective new product development process is critical to shorten the time-to-market and cost reduction for a world-class company. During a completed design process, it is necessary to understand the multi-attributes of customer requirements and to develop a customer-driven design chain that is capable for collaborative design. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been widely used in the design process to better meet the needs of the customers. The main purpose of this paper is to formulate and to optimize the relationships of a design chain, including customers, manufacturers, and critical suppliers, using QFD and a mathematical model. The developed model is illustrated by a numerical example. The solved model represents the optimized relationship of this collaborative design chain. Finding of this paper can be used as the basis for practitioners to develop an optimized customer-driven design chain.