Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/R96187/01
Title:	An Integrated QFD and Case Based Reasoning Framework for New Product Development
Principal Investigator:	Yang, Professor J
Other Investigators:	Dale, Professor B
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Manchester School of Management
Organisation:	UMIST
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 September 2002	Ends:	30 September 2002	Value (£):	3,800
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Design Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
In the new millennium, customers and consumers have put much higher demands on the quality of services and products. It is important for manufacturers to adopt a customer-focused approach in new product development. There is a clear demand to develop scientific methodologies and user-friendly tools to capture customer needs and expectations quickly and translate them into product characteristics accurately and consistently. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) tools are simple to use, easy to comprehend and have proven successful to support customer-oriented new product design. However, they have limitations. Firstly it is difficult to use manual QFD tools to handle a large amount of information and this prohibits the reuse of previous knowledge. Secondly, customer requirements are inherently subjective and product characteristics are of both a quantitative and qualitative nature, whilst manual QFD tools are limited in handling the types of information simultaneously. Thirdly, there is limited in-depth research into relationships between customer requirements and product characteristics and among product characteristics. Finally, there is a lack of research in developing sophisticated techniques to set appropriate target values for product characteristics. The aim of the project is to develop an integrated QFD and case based reasoning framework to address the above problems using techniques from quality management, engineering design, decision sciences and artificial intelligence.
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