Quality function deployment (QFD) refers to an over-all concept that provides a means of translating customer requirements into the appropriate technical requirements for each stage of product development and production. The stages of product development referred to, in this case, include; marketing strategies, planning, product design, and engineering, prototype evaluation, production process development, production, and sales. The article provides a literature review of the QFD based on a reference bank regarding 650 QFD in Japan and the United States. Also, a partial list of the QFD organizations, software’s and online resources have been accounted for in the article. A categorical analysis of the QFD applications in terms of why and where it has been applied, such as for what purposes and to which industries that have applied the QFD, has also been analyzed.
The article also has reviewed the methodological development of the QFD, which includes quantitative methods that can be applied to it as well as its extensions and implementations issues. The various quantitative methods that have been suggested to work with QFDs in helping achieve reliability and objectiveness include methods of management science/operational research, fuzzy logic, and marketing research. Several QFD extensions or modifications have been made to make the QFDs more representative and workable, and some of the works include combining QFD and failure mode effects analysis, comprehensive QFD, computational QFD as well as the concurrent functional deployment extending QFDs’ quality plans to several lifecycle value assets.
The articles have also conducted comparative studies on QFDs, which has been done to ensure the popularity of the QFDs. Some of the comparative studies include a case-based comparison of two QFD models for product development and comparison of communication patterns of two new product development teams with and without QFD. Furthermore, the article has enlisted a list of ten informative and popular QFD publications, which provides the readers with easy references to advance their knowledge of QFDs, especially for those who have no prior knowledge of the topic. On doing this, the article is estimated to serve the needs of the interested readers and therefore help in promoting the future development of the QFDs in bettering the services offered to customers.