Optimal new product design using quality function deployment with empirical value functions

The house of quality (HOQ) has been widely proposed as a method for capturing the voice of the customer (VOC) when developing requirements for new products. The methodology has lacked a formal mechanism for trading off customer preferences with technical feasibility and economic reality. We propose a non‐linear mathematical program for determining the optimal engineering specifications during new product development as a function of elicited customer value functions, engineering development and production costs and development time constraints. The model is shown to be computationally feasible for realistic‐size problems and to outperform heuristic approaches. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.