Customer satisfaction driven quality improvement target planning for product development in automotive industry

Customer satisfaction targets for vehicle attributes are set at the corporate level with limited consideration of the engineering feasibility and interactions between different product features. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for target planning for customer satisfaction driven quality improvement efforts in the product development process. The proposed framework facilitates a link between corporate decision making and engineering decision making by integrating best practices and structuring technical activities. Potential vehicle attributes are classified and prioritized for further improvement using Kano model and quality function deployment. Customer satisfaction targets are established based on rigorous business analysis and trade-off studies. These targets are converted into objective engineering metrics using regression models. Transfer function equations are developed to provide a link between higher-level product characteristics and lower-level design variables. The mathematical models are formulated as optimization problems to cascade down top-level targets to lower-level elements within given constraints. A case example is presented to demonstrate the proposed methodology.