Abstract
High quality, low cost, and time-to-market are three key factors in new product development. They not only require excellent marketing strategy, design capability, and manufacturing technology, but also depend on good information management in a product life cycle. This research proposes a new method, One-Step QFD: 3*HOQ, to overcome the deficiency of QFD practices in new product development. In the method, marketing people, design engineers, and manufacturing staff concurrently work together on linking customer requirements to product functions, product specifications, and functional modules, thus reducing misalignment between the cascade process between HOQ’s and lowering the complexity of implementing traditional QFD. A customer-oriented 3D morphological chart is then constructed with the part models more correlated to the customer requirements which have been identified by the new QFD method. This online morphological chart works as a computer-aided tool for conceptual design of simple variant products. A prototype software system id implemented based on the MVC structure. Conceptual design experimentation is conducted with the system to verify its effectiveness. In the experiment, a group of industrial design students generate design alternatives for sketches of computer mouse with the aid of this tool, while the other group performs the same task without it. The result shows that the first group outperforms the second one by producing more sketches that all fulfill manufacturability of the product. In addition, a scenario of B2B business operation demonstrates that the morphological chart facilitates product information dissemination in a product life cycle.