An integrated information system for product design planning

In recent years, new product development (NPD) has become more and more competitive and globalized, and the planning phase is absolutely critical for the success of a NPD project. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been recognized as one of the most important approaches for NPD. Nevertheless, the issues of product design scheduling and costing have not been explicitly addressed in the deployment process. On the other hand, the design structure matrix (DSM), a popular representation and analysis technique, has led to its increasing use in a variety of contexts, including product development, project management and system engineering. In this paper, we develop a novel framework which integrates QFD and DSM to support product design planning, including product architecture/components deployment, design scheduling and costing. A knowledge-based database is developed to support the proposed framework. The details are presented and a prototype product design planning system is implemented with a practical application in the semiconductor industry, system-on-a-chip product design planning, to validate the completeness and benefits of the proposed approach.