Development of redesign method of production system based on QFD

Abstract

In order to catch up with rapidly changing market environment, rapid and flexible redesign of production system is quite important. For effective and rapid redesign of production system, a redesign support system is eagerly needed. To this end, this paper proposes a redesign method of production system based on Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This method represents a designer's intention in the form of QFD, collects experts' knowledge as “Production Method (PM) modules,” and formulates redesign guidelines as seven redesign operations so as to support a designer to find out improvement ideas in a systematical manner. This paper also illustrates a redesign support tool of a production system we have developed based on this method, and demonstrates its feasibility with a practical example of a production system of a contact probe. A result from this example shows that comparable cost reduction to those of veteran designers can be achieved by a novice designer. From this result, we conclude our redesign method is effective and feasible for supporting redesign of a production system.

Keywords

• redesign method
• production system
• quality function deployment
• quality value
• production method module