Requirements development process for manufacturing information systems based on quality function deployment

Abstract

The requirements development process (RDP) is an important stage in deploying functional requirements from user requirements in the design of a manufacturing information system. As the RDP may contain subjective views or misunderstanding of user requirements, developers of a manufacturing information system should verify the effectiveness, consistency and completeness of the requirements in an RDP. Quality function deployment (QFD), a systematic process of deploy product functions the voice of customer, provides developers with a solid mechanism to check the effectiveness of the voice of customers and to ensure the consistency and completeness of product functions in the product development process. In order to utilise these advantages of QFD, this study proposes a QFD-based RDP that introduces the concept of QFD to the existing RDP. The QFD-based RDP in the design of a manufacturing information system defines the critical-to-system functions as product critical-to-quality (CTQ) of the QFD-1 process and derives the functional requirements from critical-to-system functions in the CTQ of the QFD-2 process. Thus, it is able to easily check the effectiveness of the user requirements and to guarantee the consistency and completeness of functional requirements. This study describes all the activities and tasks of each step of the RDP in detail for developers to execute the RDP by themselves. In order to check the usefulness of the proposed RDP, this study also applies it to the design stage of a quality management system and conducts comparison test with general RDP.