An Integrated Quality Tools Approach for New Product Development

Abstract

New product development (NPD) is critical in competitive environment, because of short product lifecycles, the rapidly changing technology and customers’ new requirements. When developing new products, the NPD team needs an integrated approach, because they should go back to the necessary stages according to the feedback and outputs gathered in NPD process. Sometime, team members do not know when and how to go to the necessary stages. Therefore, an integrated quality tools framework for NPD is proposed. Quality function deployment (QFD), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), Pareto analysis and poka-yoke techniques are used mainly. Pareto analysis is used to start corrective actions for risk priority numbers (RPN) values in FMEA stage, instead of threshold value to decrease subjectivity. The proposed methodology also gives some recommendations about teamwork and NPD documents such as quality control plan and product manual to increase the efficiency of NPD process and design quality. The proposed integrated framework is applied in an industrial production company as a real case study, and the results are satisfactory.