Multi-issue negotiation in quality function deployment: Modified Even-Swaps in new product development

Quality function deployment (QFD) is one of the most powerful methodologies in new product development (NPD) because of its systematic support of knowledge creation and sharing. However, greater product complexity, increasing dynamic customer requirements and further decentralization of innovation teams undermine applicability of QFD in modern NPD. Modifying QFD methodology with a multi-issue negotiation mechanism promises to overcome these obstacles because this negotiation-based structure (i) enables QFD to define a large number of interdependent decision parameters while handling complicated design trade-offs, (ii) includes changing customer requirements in real-time rather than a cycle-time determined by length of the product development process, (iii) allows decentralized NPD teams to negotiate with each other and customers concurrently. This study presents a multi-issue negotiation based QFD methodology by using a recently developed mechanism for multi-issue negotiation (namely, Modified Even-Swaps) and illustrates strengths and weaknesses along with practical insights with a case study of the development of a washing machine. The QFD methodology proposed in this study provides new options to assess new product alternatives by allowing customer co-creation which is essential in complex and often tacit-knowledge dependent comparisons and also intrinsically helpful for fine-tuning dynamically evolving customer requirements. Moreover, it supports competition-based interactions of decentralized NPD teams.