Design function deployment

The recent past has witnessed a growing interest towards the adoption of new methodologies to design. Concurrent engineering one such methodology, is a means of performing several activities which are related to the design, manufacture and use stages of a product life cycle in a simultaneous and integrated manner, at the outset of design. This is unlike the traditional approach, where these activities are performed in a sequential manner. Inspite of the increased interest, there is limited literature to show how the concurrent engineering methodology can be implemented and actualised. Quality function deployment (QFD) which employs a charting technique is a methodology that enables a coherent link between customer requirements and the production planning of the product developed. In the process of implementing QFD, the customer requirements are translated into quality functions at various levels up to the production planning level, at which stage the design is completed. This however does not reflect the number of engineering and scientific considerations that are involved in the design process. Design Function Deployment, DFD, is a computer based design system which assists the designer to (a) accept and translate customer requirements into design functions (b) synthesise the different possible architectures to meet the requirements functionally (c) analyse and develop individual architectures by the application of other scientific and engineering programs and (d) converge towards the preferred solution by systematic evaluation.