New Product Development Process (NPD) is a key aspect of launching new and innovative products in the market. Many products fail in the market because of technical risks, financial risks and product development time risks. It is very important to understand the overall risk factors associated with different stages of product development so that risks can be mitigated effectively. This paper presents a methodology to understand the risk associated with the initial stages of NPD. Design flexibility is higher in initial design stages requiring minimum redesign efforts and costs. It is a great opportunity to deal with risk factors and uncertainties in initial design stages than the later design stages. Product development costs in initial stages are around 5 to 10 percent but impact is 70 to 80 percent so exploration assessment in initial stages of NPD can be hugely beneficial. Stage-wise risk assessment will also provide the details of risk associated with each stage, which will be helpful in implementing appropriate mitigation strategies. Since transition from one stage to another stage of NPD is independent of the previous stage, different NPD stages can be easily expressed by the transition state of the Markov process. In this paper, the Markov process has been used for the risk assessment of initial stages of NPD, keeping mitigation strategies in mind. The three initial stages of NPD considered in this study include the concept design, detailed design and integration & testing stages. This paper also explores a method by integration of quality function deployment (QFD) and Markov process, to understand risk patterns associated with several complete design solutions (CFDs). By using QFD, the mapping between customer requirements can be reflected into risk assessment of complete design solutions (CFDs). This methodology has been demonstrated by a case study on Coffee Maker.

This research aims to investigate the impact of school efficiency on student development and sheds light on the way that top-universities enhance students’ knowledge, skills, health, and psychological development. Through interviewing and sending online questionnaires to over 2000 students from 5 top universities in Vietnam based on Ranking Web of Universities, the research results suggest the significant influence of school-related factors, student demographic factors, and students’ personality on student development. Specifically, teaching quality has a positive relationship with all dependent variables except for psychosocial development. The results also illustrate that school facilities positively relate to students’ satisfaction but negatively associate with their academic performance. Additionally, the research points out that boys have better psychological, mental, and physical development than girls do. At the same time, students with lower schoolyear tend to have a higher level of studying satisfaction. Furthermore, the impact of personality, including openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, on student development is remarkable due to their significant positive connections with all five dependent variables. On the other hand, agreeable students appear to have less psychological development than those in other personality groups.

The competition in the business world, including banking, is getting tighter. For that, every bank must think of the right strategy to win the competition. One important strategy for winning competition is to prioritize customer satisfaction which is determined by the quality of banking services offered to customers. This study aims to analyze and process proposals for improvement in service quality in terms of using internet banking services based on the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method through the preparation of the House of Quality (HoQ). The study was conducted on 120 internet banking users at the BRI Balikpapan Branch Office in East Kalimantan. From the results of the analysis, it is known that there are 11 indicators of bank internet banking service quality that must be improved as the first priority and 4 indicators as the second priority. Based on the results of data processing using QFD through the preparation of HoQ, it is known that there are 6 priority improvements that must be made by the bank. From the results of this study, it can be seen strategies for improving internet banking services to improve the quality of internet banking services at the BRI Balikpapan Branch Office, namely the added of new online chat features, perform server maintenance, carry out enrolment of new internet banking features, evaluate the process speed of each application feature, conduct regular website feature evaluations every quarter and perform network repair.

Green supplier selection is an important group decision making problem that includes not only economic criteria, but also environment and society criteria incorporating vagueness and imprecision. This paper proposes a new integrated quality function deployment (QFD) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) using generalized fuzzy numbers. The proposed approach initially identifies the features that the purchased product should possess in order to satisfy the company’s needs (“WHATs”), and then it seeks to establish the relevant supplier assessment criteria (“HOWs”). Then, the importance of the ‘‘WHATs’’, ‘‘HOWs’’, ‘‘HOWs’’-‘‘WHATs’’ correlation scores, and the impact of each potential green suppliers are determined based on generalized fuzzy numbers. The study applies the TOPSIS approach to rank the green suppliers. A numerical example is used to illustrate the advantages and applicability of the proposed approach.

Customer satisfaction is one of the main factors in determining the competitiveness of every industry. Along with the technological advances, it will impact on the increasingly intense competition in the business of providing great opportunities to the consumer to find a quality product at competi-tive rates. The purpose of this study is to develop the quality of automotive battery products that meet consumer needs by using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method. The application is then analyzed and its results produced a proposal for product development according to the weight and priority development on product attributes that are considered important by customers. There are two main priorities that are most desired by customers, among others for improving the quality of products maintenance free battery in automotive battery industry with quality function deployment according to consumers. Consumers need a car battery with a good durability and great performance, low price, and environment friendly features, which can be achieved by using absorbent glass mat and expanded machine technology. Based on relative weight in House of Quality, Ab-sorbent Glass Mat receives the highest percentage of technical priority that is equal to 31% whereas technology expanded gets the second highest percentage of technical priority that is equal to 19%. It means that both technologies are more important to develop this product. Therefore, the maintenance free battery products are expected to be attractive for consumers and extensive marketing.

Non-traditional machining (NTM) refers to a variety of thermal, chemical, electrical and mechanical material removal processes, developed to generate complex and intricate shapes in advanced engineering materials with high strength-to-weight ratio. Selection of the optimal NTM process for generating a desired feature on a given material requires the consideration of several factors among which the type of the work material and shape to be machined are the most significant ones. Presence of a large number of NTM processes along with their complex characteristics and capabilities, and lack of experts in NTM process selection domain compel for development of a structured approach for NTM process selection for a given machining application. Thus, the objective of this paper is set to develop a decision-making model in Visual BASIC 6.0 to automate the NTM process selection procedure with the help of graphical user interface and visual decision aids. It is also integrated with quality function deployment technique to correlate the customers’ requirements (product characteristics) with technical requirements (process characteristics). Four illustrative examples are also provided to demonstrate the potentiality of the developed model in solving NTM process selection problems.

In the contexture of a customer-driven goods or service design process, a well-timed update of customer’s requirements may not only serve as a necessity indicator to observe how things change over time, but also it incorporates the firms a better ground to interoperate different strategies to meet the future needs of its customer. This paper proposes a systematic methodology to deal with the customer needs’ dynamics, in terms of their relative weights, in the QFD. Compared with previous research, the contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, it applies some linguistic variables to get preferences of customers and experts to determine the relative importance of customer requirements (CRs) and the relationships between customer requirements and engineering characteristics (ECs). Second, it proposes the implementation of a forecasting technique. Third, it describes more comprehensively on how future uncertainty in the weights of customer’s needs could be estimated and transmitted into the design attributes. Fourth, it proposes the implementation of a quantitative approach, which takes into account the decision maker’s attitude towards risk to optimize the QFD decision making analysis. Finally, a real-world application of QFD is provided to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed methodology.

This paper introduces a tool named EB-QFD used for electronic business planning in strategic issues. Nowadays, the challenges of manufacturing sectors for achieving global competition will depend on their speed to change from domestic to world class manufacturing organizations, also the rapid global deployment of electronic business, information technology and their benefits have required managers to make decision, which look for a balance world class manufacturing factors with strategic business goals. To ensure that selected e-business strategies meet world class manufacturing requirements, organizations should simultaneously explore and communicate the relationship between world class manufacturing and electronic business. Electronic business planners can achieve competitive advantages through the implementation of an integration of quality function deployment (QFD) with electronic business (EB) called EB-QFD. This study is based on data collected from an Iranian auto parts manufacturing company and the implementation of EB-QFD. In this research, EB-QFD contains two parts named EB-WHATs as needs of Electronic Business and EB-HOWs as resources for EB-WHATs. Statistical analysis points that there are positive relationships between using EB-WHATs and EB-HOW and world class manufacturing factors as competitive advantages. We used electronic business systems for EB-WHATs and resource based view (RBV) for EB-HOWs.