Novel Two-Phase Approach for Process Optimization of Customer Collaborative Design Based on Fuzzy-QFD and DSM

In response to fast-growing and rapidly changing global markets, launching new products faster than competitors does not only assist enterprises in acquiring a larger market share, but also in reducing development lead time. However, owing to the intrinsically uncertain properties of new product development management, manufacturing companies often struggle with the dilemma of whether to increase product variety or control manufacturing complexity. This paper proposes a novel two-phase method to assist an enterprise in achieving a customer collaborative product design. In the first phase, quality function deployment, which is based on fuzzy multicriteria decision making and suppliers' budget constraints, is presented to maximize customers' satisfaction. In the second phase, an effective approach is proposed to determine the appropriate sequence of several coupled activities with the minimum total feedback time in a design structure matrix. Finally, a real case is used to illustrate the overall applicability of the approach. The optimization results show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over other reported methods in the literature.