QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN THE CONTOURS OF CONTINUOUS PRODUCT IMPROVEMENT

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to ensure the success of product development and improvement projects through a better understanding of customer needs, as well as procedures and processes to enhance communication by integrating the Voice of the Customer (VoC), obtained through quality methods and tools, to the House of Quality (HoQ), to support information processing and strategic decision making in the product development or improvement process. For the technical procedures the QFD tool was adopted. Excel software was also used to create the QFD spreadsheet and to visualize how the project design would look another software contributed, CATIA V5. From the results it can be concluded that a training program must accompany the creation of a new project. Everyone involved, customers, suppliers, employees, and management need to be aligned and use the same communication channel.