In today’s competitive world, companies frequently introduce new products or redesign their existing products to meet the fast changing tastes and preferences of their customers. Products which fail to satisfy customers’ need disappear soon from the market. Hence, understanding customers’ requirements and incorporating them into the design characteristics of the products have become the priority for the companies. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one of the tools which help the companies in achieving this objective by incorporating customers’ voice in the product development process. This paper explains the usefulness of QFD in the product development process and shows how the integration of Kano’s model has made it an even more effective tool in enhancing customer satisfaction.

In today’s business scenario, gaining competitive advantage is the greatest challenge the companies face. Tastes and preferences of customers are changing rapidly leading to new product development and redesigning of the existing products. Companies try to add new features to their product to attract customers and outdo the competitors by capturing more market share. Marketing a new product with better quality has become the competitive advantage for many companies, while firms lagging behind in this fierce battle of new product development and redesigning are becoming obsolete in the long run.

To reduce production cycle time and cost and improve the quality of products, companies adopt various techniques like, stage gate process, value engineering and concurrent engineering. Since the success of products depends on customers, satisfying their needs and demands remains the main aim of the companies. This is done by mapping the voice of the customers into the design characteristics of new product through Quality Function Deployment (QFD) (a technique to implement concurrent engineering). This paper presents a detailed review of QFD and its further improvement through Kano’s model and different methods adopted to integrate Kano’s model with QFD.

Operations Management Journal, Integration of Kano’s Model, Quality Function Deployment, Rationale for Product Development, Application of Kano’s Model.